In my series on How Not To Be Fooled by the media, I warned against being deceived by deceitful use of what are passed off as quotes, and against being misled by headlines. Two stories in recent days have provided textbook examples of both – one so egregious that it was retracted within a day.
The first comes from British lefty rag, the Independent:
Elon Musk ridicules Black Twitter staff and antiracism activists
As my First Law of the Media says: Never believe a headline. Headlines are concocted to be as attention-grabbing as possible (rightly enough: we do it, too), but for too many media, keeping them accurate is a secondary consideration, if at all.
Too often, an inflammatory headline will prove to be a complete misrepresentation of the content. Of course, they’re not expecting you to actually read it, they just want you to click and be outraged.
So, it shouldn’t surprise you in the least that Musk did not, in fact, “ridicule Black Twitter staff”.
Mr Musk’s tweets began when he seemingly found a set of T-shirts with the message “#StayWoke” written on them.
Indeed, Musk posted a photo, with the tweet
So, Musk is laughing at the slogan, not who made them or where they came from.
Elon Musk has appeared to mock antiracism initiatives by Twitter’s own staff, as well a Black Lives Matter more broadly.
And why wouldn’t he? “Antiracism” (as opposed to “non racism”) is an ideology that is, ironically, deeply racist. BLM is a vicious, racist fraud.
He then criticised Black Lives Matter protestors. He said that the shirts stemmed from the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, and that those protests were misguided.
“‘Hands up don’t shoot’ was made up,” he said. “The whole thing was a fiction.”
He then deleted that post, and instead simply shared a link to the Department of Justice report into the death of Michael Brown, which started those protests […]
Hours later, he shared a post more explicitly attacking those T-shirts, claiming they “stem from Ferguson protests”. “Obama’s own DOJ proved this [and] exonerated the cop.”
Again, he’s correct: “Hands up don’t shoot” was a lie so obvious that even the Independent admits it:
It is true that the Department of Justice concluded that police officer Darren Wilson had shot Michael Brown in self-defense.
The Independent
So, Musk was right. End of story.
But the Independent was quickly outdone by the Daily Kos, which ran a piece headlined:
Matt Walsh only upset “more people weren’t killed”’ at Club Q
As I pointed out in How Not to Be Fooled, anything put in quote marks is supposed to be a direct quote: the literal words someone has said. In this case, the headline clearly implies that Walsh has stated that he’s upset that, in his words, “more people weren’t killed” at a gay nightclub shooting.
I’m sure you’ll be not in the least surprised that Walsh never said any such thing.
While the words quoted are real, they’re not Matt Walsh’s. In fact:
Civil rights attorney Alejandra Caraballo tweeted, “Matt Walsh isn’t upset that someone shot up a gay bar, he’s upset that more people weren’t killed. He has a bloodlust for the murder of LGBTQ people. He’s doubling down on it and wants more of it.”
Note that this is a lawyer saying what, even on its own, is highly defamatory material.
But the Daily Kos clearly has smarter lawyers. They scrubbed the whole story and replaced it with a retraction, within a day.
The Daily Wire sent Daily Kos an email, demanding a retraction and apology and notified them that the conservative publication’s legal team has been referred to about the piece.
The piece has since been retracted.
The headline was replaced with the word “Retracted” and the text with “In a previous headline for this article, we misattributed a quote to Matt Walsh. We regret not properly quoting Walsh’s tweet. This article is in direct violation of our editorial policy, and we have removed it.”
So, what did Walsh actually say?
He tweeted on Sunday, the day after the shooting, “Leftists are using a mass shooting to try and blackmail us into accepting the castration and sexualization of children. These people are just beyond evil. I have never felt more motivated to oppose everything they stand for, with every fiber of my being. Despicable scumbags.”
Media Ite
What Walsh was referring to was the unholy haste by the left-media to attribute the shooting to growing campaign against “grooming”, which includes significant numbers of gay people, under the banner “Gays Against Groomers”. In an ironic twist for the media narrative, the killer’s attorneys have stated that he is “non-binary” and “uses They/Them pronouns”. Investigating officials have also stated that the killer has no “significant internet presence… or a history of sharing hateful views against the LGBT community”.
In an even more ironic twist, a transgender commentator on CNN argues that the killer is not “non-binary” because, in its own words, “it was obvious with the mugshot, that’s a man”.
So… you can tell just by looking at someone that they’re not a woman.
Interesting…