Epistemic closure down at the blunt, encrusted end of the stick…
the worst people in the world are trying to convince you teenagers who are kicking their asses didn’t really experience a school shooting pic.twitter.com/KJQPq3NmX9
— Jamison Foser (@jamisonfoser) March 27, 2018
Erick Erickson, who is for some reason embraced by the Very Serious People of the mainstream media, endorsed this BS as not BS. pic.twitter.com/2ZxqxghbFi
— Jamison Foser (@jamisonfoser) March 27, 2018
I actually posted an earlier version of this late last night, but quickly pulled it back, deciding the topic needed more thought. Today, Margaret Sullivan at the Washington Post published a piece well worth reading. Sullivan is a professional ombudsman (IIRC, the one who got fired when the NYTimes decided it no longer needed the pretense of objectivity). The sliming of Parkland students shows the spreading stain of media polarization”:
… “David Hogg Is A High School Bully,” was the headline of a blog post Erickson wrote soon after the shooting, referring to one of the student survivors who has become a leader in pushing for gun-control legislation. He didn’t mean Hogg was looting the lockers of his schoolmates, but, as the sub-headline claimed, “He is using his status as victim to inappropriately and ridiculously attack people while going unchallenged.”
This week, Erickson made it worse: He tweeted to his mass following what turned out to be an utter falsehood, based on an article on the RedState website speculating that Hogg may not have even been at school the day of the shooting.
He urged his audience to believe it, writing this “isn’t a fake news Gateway Pundit story.”
When that report was thoroughly debunked and RedState recanted, Erickson deleted his original tweet and posted an “update.” He did not apologize.
“I spread misinformation from someone that was credible,” Erickson told me by phone, praising the reporting of RedState writer Sarah Rumpf.
“But I didn’t double down on it, and that’s the difference between someone responsible and someone who’s not responsible.”..
Erickson’s actions matter because, despite his often extreme views, he’s seen as relatively moderate — someone who gets to offer platitudes about “healing” in the New York Times and whose comments get picked up — not as if they were the ravings of an Alex Jones, but as if he were a legitimate conservative opinion maker.
What we’re seeing here is a spreading stain, in which conspiracy mongering from the likes of Infowars and, yes, Gateway Pundit is adopted by some elements of the formerly mainstream right and peddled to a receptive audience softened up for decades by Fox News.
That kind of thing can happen on the extreme left, too, but not as regularly and not as virulently. (And it’s a truism that corrections and “updates” everywhere fail to get the visibility of the original misinformation.)
There seems to be no floor of indecency that we agree to stay above.
As Charlie Warzel, who covers “information wars” for BuzzFeed News, put it recently: Extreme partisanship — pro-Trump media as well as parts of the far left — “is not about intellectual courage. It’s about winning.”…
For the record, the original Redstate poster did apologize, in a long tweet thread…
In conclusion, David Hogg was telling the truth, I was wrong, and I’m sorry. Thank you to everyone who has defended me; I appreciate it. Thank you to everyone who has criticized me; I’ve learned from this experience. /18
— Sarah Rumpf (@rumpfshaker) March 27, 2018
… And Erickson really *is* the problem here; she’s a poster on a notoriously RWNJ blog; he’s now a Semi-Very-Serious Media Figure, who’s made his name out of clambering over the bones of left-wing “victims”…
Late Night Pavlov’s Dogs Open Thread: They’ll Believe What They WANNA BelievePost + Comments (69)