Last week I noted how Breitbart’s Ben Shapiro reported on a story that Chuck Hagel was in bed with those notorious terrorist sympathizers, Friends of Hamas – and how it turned out that the group didn’t actually exist.
Today I came across this post by the New York Daily News’s Dan Friedman, whose wisecrack to a Congressional staffer seems to have been the source for the fictional event that has now become a talking-point staple in the conservative media machine:
“I asked my source, had Hagel given a speech to, say, the “Junior League of Hezbollah, in France”? And: What about “Friends of Hamas”?
The names were so over-the-top, so linked to terrorism in the Middle East, that it was clear I was talking hypothetically and hyperbolically. No one could take seriously the idea that organizations with those names existed — let alone that a former senator would speak to them.
The source never responded, and I moved on.
I couldn’t have imagined what would happen next. On Feb. 7, the conservative web site Breitbart.com screamed this headline:
“SECRET HAGEL DONOR?: WHITE HOUSE SPOX DUCKS QUESTION ON ‘FRIENDS OF HAMAS’”
…
I am, it seems, the creator of the Friends of Hamas myth. Doing my job, I erred in counting on confidentiality and the understanding that my example was farcical — and by assuming no one would print an unchecked rumor.
If anyone didn’t know already: Partisan agendas, Internet reporting and old-fashioned carelessness can move complete crocks fast. If you see a story on Hagel addressing the Junior League of Hezbollah, that’s fake too.”
(There’s also an interesting bit about how Breitbart turned a White House staffer’s predictable response to a call from Shapiro about Friends of Hamas into a breathless “the White House refuses to respond.”)
So, just to be clear about how this whole The-Age-of-the-Internet-Is-Saving-Journalism thing is going, events transpired thus:
1. Quirky reporter makes up a silly joke name and uses it when talking to a Congressional staffer.
2. Said staffer either can’t tell that it’s a joke or cynically pretends to not be able to tell; he or she then not only passes the silly-named fake group on to a well-known, online political blogger, but adds a manufactured claim that said silly-named fake group is in bed with the nominee for Secretary of Defense.
2. Well-known online political blogger doesn’t bother wondering why silly-named fake group would have such a ridiculous name, or bother doing even the most simple internet search to find out more about the group; instead, he just reports it.
3. Rightwing media begins reporting on the story, incredibly continuing to never check to see if a group with such a silly, farcical name actually exists – or apparently even attempt to find out anything else about the group other than it has a silly name and is said to be tied to Obama’s SoD pick. (Seriously, if you are a reporter looking to tank a president you’ve been trying to oust for going on four years now, and you heard his SoD nominee was palling around with a “well known” terrorist funding group, how are you not motivated enough to pick up a phone to get a quote or turn your computer on to do a quick Nexus search? Is reporting that dead?)
4. The story is finally shown to be a complete (and literal) joke. The original source that reported it does not issue a correction; the media outlets previously running with the story continue to do so.
So, this is the awesome new world of journalism I’m supposed to be excited about?
(H/T: TPM)
No. You’re supposed to be excited about Fishgrease, or Tanta, or half a dozen subject matter experts getting to have their say about things they “live/eat/breathe”. Which is pretty freaking exciting, if you ask me.
Or, ya know, you could get excited about Serious Scoops off the internet, like that Mad Money caper.Report
Judging “Internet journalism” by the behavior of the Breitbart folks is like judging rock music by Creed. The New York Post sucks at journalism too, even though it’s a newspaper.Report
But even though this is a story that was first reported by Breitbart, many, many others are running it — yes?Report
Aren’t the ones running it pretty much all the equivalent of rightwing apparatchiks? In other words, sources that nobody who wasn’t prone to taking rightwing conspiracy theories seriously believe?Report
Including, per your original post, non-internet news sources like Fox News. The medium is not the problem.Report
Oh, perhaps I did not say it clearly enough. I am not blaming the internet, or saying it’s worse than cable news. My point was rather that those that argue to me that the internet and “citizen reporting” is going to clean up journalism into some kind of golden age have a long way to go to convince me.Report
No, you’re supposed to be wondering if Marco Rubio is ready for prime time because he had trouble drinking a glass of water on national TV.
No one cares about that Hagel stuff nationally. They care about WaterglassGate.
Was Rubio’s poor water drinking ability a symbol of his drowning on TV?
Perhaps he just didn’t have enough practice drinking water.
Maybe it’s a Catch-22 and he couldn’t drink the water properly because he was dehydrated, but if he didn’t drink the water, he’d tank the speech, which he tanked because he drank the water improperly.Report
That story didn’t seem to have a whole lot of legs after a couple of days. The MSM instead moved on to the critical story of why Obama didn’t allow reporters to shadow him while he played golf with Tiger Woods.Report
Water bottles, golf with Tiger, who cares?
The important thing is the fourth estate is out there doing its sacred job of filling in dead air in-between the annual Blizzard-gedon coverage and the next B-list celebrity tell-all.Report
I think they’re trying to feed another round of austerity via Simpson-Bowles 2 now that the Tiger Woods whine has lost its legs. Sequels almost always are worse.Report
http://www.politico.com/story/2013/02/obama-the-puppet-master-87764.html?hp=t1
I mean, this article is just hilarious on the face of it.Report
“He’s making our job as stenographers impossible!”Report
This sort of reporting has a long and dishonourable provenance. The Hearst newspapers were famous for it. When the artist Frederick Remington cabled WR Hearst saying “There will be no war.” Hearst famously shot back “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.”
Robert Heinlein verbed Walter Winchell, to winchell, defined as to rudely and intrusively lie and slander. Walter Winchell was the terror of his age, also a Hearst employee. Rush Limbaugh didn’t have anything on Winchell. Or, for that matter, another monster of those times, Westbrook Pegler.
Andrew Breitbart loved nothing more than a good fight. If truth is the first casualty of war, gossip and slander are its father and mother.Report
Also enjoy Shapiro’s completely incoherent denial that his story stems from Friedman’s joke. What matters is that he heard the same thing from three different people, none of whom was the guy who first misunderstood Friedman. Because it’s not like rumors spread. And the fact that Friends of Hamas doesn’t exist in the real world is irrelevant, or at least unaddressed. Anyway, you’ll never guess the real story: it’s how the media is totally in the tank for Obama! (Oh, you did guess that.)Report
This kind of makes me think of the whole Wikipedia hoax regarding the Bicholim War.Report
I dunno. I read Shapiro’s original article, and I don’t see what he should have done differently. It was poorly-sourced, but he made it clear that it was. The blame is on anyone who didn’t read past the headlines.Report
He could have verified that the organization exists. I’d like to think I’d have done that at least to get some juicy incendiary material about how nefarious they are.Report
I think this is the part that makes me smell a skunk.
It seems pretty unlikely that no one running with this story – especially Shapiro – would have passed up the opportunity to do a quick Nexus search to tie other terrible events, declarations, associations and quotes from FoH with Hagel (and therefore Obama).
So I have to wonder if Shapiro and a bunch of others that ran with this story early on didn’t figure out it was bogus, and then decided the narrative was too page-hitty to pass up.Report
“Anonymous Source Claims Hagel Funded By Non-existent Hate Group!”Report
next up: “Anonymous Source Claims Hagel Is Anti-Christ, Film At 11!”Report