Former member of the military trolls the right. Tweets false details regarding Presidents attending military funerals, tweet is picked up by the right blogosphere and reported as fact.
Calls for Howard to censure him for his social media activity in 3… 2…
The Kenyan Socialist Usurper might not attend military funerals, but thank God there are some patriots who never miss one.Report
*Yawn*Report
225+ retweets? Got into actual press without folks actually fact checking.
*tip of the hat*Report
Do we get to claim that those aren’t influential, relevant, or mainstream right-wing publications? Or do we only get to do that when it’s left-wing people who did something stupid?Report
Yes, but only if you can pull some stats.
I may really dislike “MoveOn” (this came up with the whole Betray-Us thingy)… but they are a pretty big group of people. (influential/relevant/mainstream? maybe not…)Report
Sure.
The specific telling point to me wasn’t that the Right-o-sphere seized upon some data point that reinforced their narrative and republished it without fact-checking, it’s more of “it’s pretty easy for this to happen very quickly” (see also: the story about cheese boards).
Notable, though, is that The Washington Examiner is sort of actually a thing, part of the same media empire that controls The Weekly Standard, and Byron is their political reporter, and he fessed up, “I played a role in that. On Saturday morning, I tweeted, without comment, a link to the original Legal Insurrection article.”
This is where the line between reporters (and editors) on one side and reporters (and social media) on the other gets really blurry.Report