For those who haven’t been keeping up, a video went viral on
Twitter the other day showing a smug teenager wearing a Trump “Make America
Great Again” cap hassling a native America elder. It made great press and fed
the unending outrage of the Trump haters. The video was viewed at least 2.5
million times, and re-Tweeted over 14,000 times. And a number of mainstream media reporters and commentators picked it up and expressed the appropriate outrage. Only trouble was, it wasn’t true. Other videos
show it was the teenagers, a Catholic school group on tour, who were being hassled
by the America Indian elder, who pushed his way into the group calling them “beasts”,
and the supposedly smug teenager was in fact trying to defuse the situation.
Just to make it worse, it turns out the video was posted
from a fake twitter account, supposedly owned by a California teacher but
actually run by a blogger in Brazil who posts provocative stuff. (Twitter banned
the account, but inevitably it will pop up again under a new name.)
This, it seems to me, is a poster child for all that is
wrong with American politics and media today. The mainstream media will push or spin or even
fabricate any story, however poorly substantiated or vetted, that can tear down
Trump, because it feeds their reader base. The gullible public will believe
anything that shows up on Twitter so long as it feeds what they want to
believe. And because of that, bad actors all around the world, not just in
Russia, can mess with the American voting public’s mind at will.
Nor is this an isolated case. Another recent example is the recent
widely-discussed claim that the Muller investigation had proof that Trump had
ordered his lawyer to lie to Congress. The report was subsequently denied by
the Muller investigation itself, but not before the networks had spent hours gleefully
discussing the implications. And of course the story was headlined, but the
subsequent denial was buried on page 30. As Mark Twain said " A lie can go around the world before the truth can get its boots on".
One wonders how the nation will survive with such a gullible
and easily mislead voting public.
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