{"id":68790,"date":"2018-12-17T11:00:35","date_gmt":"2018-12-17T17:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=68790"},"modified":"2019-09-27T08:52:15","modified_gmt":"2019-09-27T13:52:15","slug":"politifact-smear-by-association","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=68790","title":{"rendered":"Politifact: Smear By Association"},"content":{"rendered":"

Politifact long ago gave up any claim to being non-partisan, at least among people who pay attention.\u00a0 \u00a0Fact-checking Politi”fact” is itself a target-rich environment for fact-checkers and “progressive” dogma-untanglers<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This year, they were kind of sly about it – the “winner” was “the \u201conline smear machine\u201d that attempted to \u201ctake down Parkland students.\u201d<\/p>\n

They’re referring mostly to Alex Jones’ reprehensible claims that the Parkland massacre was a setup and that the kids are “crisis actors”, and the small but vocal social media crowd that echoed the claim.<\/p>\n

Of course, this brings up a logical problem, and a condundrum<\/p>\n

First the logical problem, as David Harsanyi points out in Federalist<\/em><\/a>:\u00a0\u00a0–<\/p>\n

Although I know of numerous Twitter accounts that have accused gun-rights advocates of being \u201cterrorists,\u201d many of them featuring blue checkmarks, I can\u2019t recall a single conservative in Congress, anyone in the National Rifle Association, or any other mainstream right-wing group accusing the Parkland kids of being \u201ccrisis actors.\u201d I do recall a single article on RedState questioning David Hogg\u2019s actions the day of the mass shooting, which was quickly corrected and apologized for.<\/p>\n

Yet PolitiFact spends much of its time detailing the Parkland kids\u2019 cause by highlighting their political opponents who have nothing to do with the smear, implicitly linking them to the \u201cLie of the Year.\u201d The piece is framed in a way that intimates that anyone contesting the Parkland kids\u2019 political cause is now in league with the online mob \u2013 and Russian bots!<\/p>\n

By the way, even if we allow that kids who experience this tragedy should dictate the contours of a policy debate, it is worth noting that there are \u201cParkland kids\u201d who hold\u00a0diverging opinions<\/a>\u00a0regarding the Second Amendment and arming teachers. They are largely ignored by the media.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not the kids\u2019 fault that they find themselves the focus of ugliness on social media. It\u2019s the fault of those who attack them\u00a0and<\/em>\u00a0the adults who exploit them for political causes. Young people should be given some leeway in their activism, even if they say ridiculous things\u2014and David Hogg and other leaders of the March for Our Lives movement often say things that aren\u2019t even in the proximity of the truth. There is no need for\u00a0ad hominem<\/a><\/em>attacks. But the \u201cParkland kids\u201d were also given a massive stage on which to offer their uncontested emotionalism to drive the debate. Kids or not, Americans have every right to challenge their contentions.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And Politifact using Jones as the figurehead of this criticism is a strawman that tries to paint\u00a0all\u00a0<\/em>criticism of Hogg and company as the same breed of crazy.\u00a0 \u00a0And yet Hogg and the rest of the kids that’ve been propped up with liberal plutocrat money\u00a0deserve\u00a0<\/em>criticism; they are little petty tyrants in the making, and they are serial liars to boot.<\/p>\n

Now the conundrum; without Politifact to tell people who Alex Jones was and what he was claiming, would anyone outside the alt-“right” fever swamp have ever heard of him?<\/p>\n

The \u201conline smear machine\u201d is an amorphous and ugly entity that isn\u2019t confined to any ideology and spares virtually no one in the public eye. But any way you look at it, imbuing it with an importance it doesn\u2019t deserve isn\u2019t doing public discourse any favors. Even if it makes conservatives look bad.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And finally – given that almost nobody in this country hears about Alex Jones except when the media expresses its high dudgeon over him, are his antics\u00a0really\u00a0<\/em>“the biggest lie” of the year?\u00a0 Or even the biggest lie about the Parkland massacre?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s debatable, in fact, that it was even the most significant lie disseminated about the mass shooting at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High. The sheriff of Broward County, after all, was featured at the widely covered CNN\u00a0anti-gun rally<\/a>\u00a0where he misled the nation about the\u00a0failures, cowardice, and incompetence<\/a>\u00a0that allowed the shooting to occur. And the sheriff of Broward County isn\u2019t some random Twitter troll.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yet.<\/p>\n

Further evidence that the mainstream media needs to be distrusted but verified – and then, especially on hot-button topics like this, almost invariably distrusted some more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Politifact long ago gave up any claim to being non-partisan, at least among people who pay attention.\u00a0 \u00a0Fact-checking Politi”fact” is itself a target-rich environment for fact-checkers and “progressive” dogma-untanglers. This year, they were kind of sly about it – the “winner” was “the \u201conline smear machine\u201d that attempted to \u201ctake down Parkland students.\u201d They’re referring […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[412,230,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-68790","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-childrens-crusade","category-the-fact-check-scam","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68790","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=68790"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68790\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":69511,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68790\/revisions\/69511"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=68790"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=68790"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=68790"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}