Oct 14th 2019,10 tweets, 2 min read 1. A short explanation of why Big Media entities float outrageous BS into public consumption. Remember the "animals" uproar? 2. That was perfect example of this tactic and, in that case, a huge chunk of the mainstream media and the Twitter Blue Check Mark Mafia pretended that President Trump referred to illegal immigrants as animals, when he was actually referring to the demonic gang MS-13. 3. Here's the intended effect of the tactic: even after the truth comes out, there will still be a significant segment of the public who believes the falsehood.
And there will be nothing you can do to show them that they are wrong. 4. That's the beauty of Big Media outrageous BS flotation. Call it weaponization of disinformation.
5. I noticed this pattern long ago and now, with instant communication, it happens so much, I don't usually bother to comment on it. But a lot of honest people are shocked that information purveyors do this. Honest people expect others to be honest. 6. But after the last dozen or so KNOWN Big Media hoaxes, the expectation of honesty from any of them is naive at best and stupid at worst. 7. Big Media's intent: to gain converts to the "correct" POV. In this case, the "correct" one is that the US has abandoned the Kurds, as if the latter were a singular national entity. (They are not.) 8. The "Turkish attack video" -- in reality, video of range practice at Kentucky -- served its purpose. The correct POV got a few more converts. 9. We should always be ready for the next flotation. And there will be a next one, maybe even today. END ADDENDUM: Here's the video that ABC probably used to craft its latest lie. From 2015 at Knob Creek Gun Range in Kentucky.
Former federal prosecutor Joe diGenova: “The current United States ambassador Marie Yovanovitch has bad mouthed the President of the United States to Ukrainian officials and has told them not to listen or worry about Trump policy because he’s going to be impeached.” pic.twitter.com/VOsmslfaao
On Thursday’s episode of “The Ben Shapiro Show,” Shapiro talks about the media’s outrageous reaction to President Donald Trump tweeting a Daily Wire meme about Conan, the dog that sustained minor injuries while hunting down Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Video and partial transcript below:
So The Daily Wire social media team, who listen to the show and then very often create memes that are often kind of drawn from the general themes of the show, they put out a meme, and the meme was a picture of President Trump awarding the “Medal of Pawner” to [Conan the Hero] dog.
[Our team found] a picture of President Trump awarding a Medal of Honor to an American hero named James McCloughan, who is credited with saving the lives of 10 men in a battle in Vietnam, and this photo had nothing to do with McCloughan. The last thing that The Daily Wire would ever think of doing is deriding an actual war hero, of course, and nobody actually thinks that’s what the Daily Wire social media team was doing with — Are they really suggesting that this was meant to dishonor the person who was at the center of the photo? No. The Daily Wire social media team took this photo and they just put in the dog. They obviously photoshopped in the dog.
So it’s President Trump putting not the Medal of Honor, it’s a medal that has a picture of a paw print on it, on the dog, obviously photoshopped. It has our watermark in the bottom right hand corner of the picture, nobody’s trying to hide the ball here. This is just a cute little tribute to a very good doggy. That’s all. It’s a joke and a cute little tribute to a very good doggy.
So President Trump sees this, and he thinks it’s cute because one of the charming things about Trump, and there are many things that are not charming about Trump, one of the wonderful, charming things about Trump is that when the man sees something that he enjoys, he sort of puts it out there. So he put out our picture with the watermark in the right hand corner of himself giving the “Medal of Pawner” to the dog … [And] President Trump then tweets out, “AMERICAN HERO!”
Now, this should be the end of the story. It’s just like a cute, funny little tweet. But no, our intrepid media are on the case. The Washington Post, and The New York Times, and USA Today and pretty much everybody else covers this as though it’s actual news and that it’s a scandal — not just that President Trump tweeted out a meme, but that it’s a real scandal … .
This story from Alex Horton, reporter at The Washington Post. Here’s a first note: Alex Horton apparently is an Iraq war veteran. Nothing but respect for his military service. Also, this is insanely bad reporting. So two things can be true at once: Alex Horton can be an American patriot who served honorably in Iraq; also, he can be an unbelievably crappy reporter. So here is his report from The Washington Post. The headline says, “Trump tweeted a photo of a Medal of Honor recipient — who was edited it out and replaced by Conan the dog”
Then it says:
In a somber White House ceremony in July 2017, President Trump draped the Medal of Honor around the neck of James McCloughan. He was credited with saving the lives of 10 men in a brutal, days-long battle in Vietnam, and Trump told the former Army medic that “we are in all of your actions and your bravery.
On Wednesday, Trump posted a photo of that moment with McCloughan’s image replaced by that of a dog.
The distinctive star of metal was replaced with a paw print.
Trump and the Pentagon initially declined to release the dog’s name, later confirmed as Conan, but the canine has since become a social media sensation after Trump tweeted a photo of the dog on Monday.
Since then, the dog has been a feature of countless memes.
Conan also collided with a real-world moment after the conservative site Daily Wire tweeted the image Tuesday with McCloughan removed. A watermark of the site appears in Trump’s tweet, but it is cropped version that removed the attribution of the source photo, which is the Associated Press.
That’s because the source photo has now been dramatically altered. The source photo did not include a dog or a Medal of Pawner, you idiots. It’s called a meme. This is how memes work on the interwebs.
That would have indicated it began as a legitimate news photo, raising the question of whether Trump or a staffer knew McCloughan had been edited out.
Okay, so I’m pretty fairly certain that Trump knew he had not actually awarded the “Medal of Pawner” to a dog. I’m fairly certain that Trump knew this. Now, even if you thought that Trump may have forgotten that he awarded the Medal of Honor to a dog, I feel like he would have known that it wasn’t real once he looked and saw it was a Medal of Pawner. It’s a paw on the medal … Then this is the best part:
Jeremy Boreing, the chief operating officer at the Daily Wire, dismissed emailed questions about whether the altered photo originated from his publication.
Okay, this is the part that’s totally insane. So, Jeremy, who is my longtime business partner and chief operating officer at Daily Wire — co-founder of Daily Wire. Listen to that sentence again: “dismissed emailed questions about whether the altered photo originated from his publication.”
First of all, number one, our watermark’s on it. It’s like, right there in Trump’s original tweet, but the way that’s reported, sounds like Boreing dismissed questions — like he wouldn’t, we refused. We at The Daily Wire, we were so scared of the question, we refused to answer the question as to whether the altered photo originated from our publication. We just refused, because this a scoop, guys. Here’s how the actual exchange went:
Alex Horton e-mailed our social media team. He said:
Hello, I’m with The Washington Post, and I wanted to get confirmation this photo originated with you, and if it did, that you digitally removed Medal of Honor recipient James McCloughan and replaced him with a dog.
Jeremy responded the way that any normal human being could respond, it is a pretty epic response. He wrote back:
Alex, on the record, you’ve got to be f***ing joking. Please quote me on that. Thanks, Jeremy.
We jokingly call Jeremy the “god-king,” but he definitely was great there. That’s spectacular stuff from Jeremy …
Then, it was reported by The Washington Post as Jeremy “dismissed emailed questions” about — What? No, he didn’t dismiss emailed questions. He dismissed your stupid question, he dismissed you. Like, there’s no way to read that as Jeremy saying, “You know, we have no comment.” We issue “no comments” here all the time here at The Daily Wire. It’s a thing that everybody does in the media, that happens. If we wanted to “no comment,” you know what we could’ve done? “No comment.”
Richard Stengel, a former editor of Time, is the author of “Information Wars” and was the State Department’s undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs from 2013 to 2016.
When I was a journalist, I loved Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s assertion that the Constitution and the First Amendment are not just about protecting “free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.”
But as a government official traveling around the world championing the virtues of free speech, I came to see how our First Amendment standard is an outlier. Even the most sophisticated Arab diplomats that I dealt with did not understand why the First Amendment allows someone to burn a Koran. Why, they asked me, would you ever want to protect that?
It’s a fair question. Yes, the First Amendment protects the “thought that we hate,” but it should not protect hateful speech that can cause violence by one group against another. In an age when everyone has a megaphone, that seems like a design flaw.
It is important to remember that our First Amendment doesn’t just protect the good guys; our foremost liberty also protects any bad actors who hide behind it to weaken our society. In the weeks leading up to the 2016 election, Russia’s Internet Research Agency planted false stories hoping they would go viral. They did. Russian agents assumed fake identities, promulgated false narratives and spread lies on Twitter and Facebook, all protected by the First Amendment.
The Russians understood that our free press and its reflex toward balance and fairness would enable Moscow to slip its destructive ideas into our media ecosystem. When Putin said back in 2014 that there were no Russian troops in Crimea — an outright lie — he knew our media would report it, and we did.
That’s partly because the intellectual underpinning of the First Amendment was engineered for a simpler era. The amendment rests on the notion that the truth will win out in what Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas called “the marketplace of ideas.” This “marketplace” model has a long history going back to 17th-century English intellectual John Milton, but in all that time, no one ever quite explained how good ideas drive out bad ones, how truth triumphs over falsehood.
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Milton, an early opponent of censorship, said truth would prevail in a “free and open encounter.” A century later, the framers believed that this marketplace was necessary for people to make informed choices in a democracy. Somehow, magically, truth would emerge. The presumption has always been that the marketplace would offer a level playing field. But in the age of social media, that landscape is neither level nor fair.
On the Internet, truth is not optimized. On the Web, it’s not enough to battle falsehood with truth; the truth doesn’t always win. In the age of social media, the marketplace model doesn’t work. A 2016 Stanford study showed that 82 percent of middle schoolers couldn’t distinguish between an ad labeled “sponsored content” and an actual news story. Only a quarter of high school students could tell the difference between an actual verified news site and one from a deceptive account designed to look like a real one.
Since World War II, many nations have passed laws to curb the incitement of racial and religious hatred. These laws started out as protections against the kinds of anti-Semitic bigotry that gave rise to the Holocaust. We call them hate speech laws, but there’s no agreed-upon definition of what hate speech actually is. In general, hate speech is speech that attacks and insults people on the basis of race, religion, ethnic origin and sexual orientation.
I think it’s time to consider these statutes. The modern standard of dangerous speech comes from Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969) and holds that speech that directly incites “imminent lawless action” or is likely to do so can be restricted. Domestic terrorists such as Dylann Roof and Omar Mateen and the El Paso shooter were consumers of hate speech. Speech doesn’t pull the trigger, but does anyone seriously doubt that such hateful speech creates a climate where such acts are more likely?
Let the debate begin. Hate speech has a less violent, but nearly as damaging, impact in another way: It diminishes tolerance. It enables discrimination. Isn’t that, by definition, speech that undermines the values that the First Amendment was designed to protect: fairness, due process, equality before the law? Why shouldn’t the states experiment with their own version of hate speech statutes to penalize speech that deliberately insults people based on religion, race, ethnicity and sexual orientation?
All speech is not equal. And where truth cannot drive out lies, we must add new guardrails. I’m all for protecting “thought that we hate,” but not speech that incites hate. It undermines the very values of a fair marketplace of ideas that the First Amendment is designed to protect.
Interesting tidbits I found, mainly for my own entertainment. I copied some sites, since after some time, I find they are gone.
Erdekessegek amit talaltam, foleg a magam szorakoztatasara. Nehany oldalt masoltam, mert egy ido utan eltunnek.
