From the first Morning Jolt of the week:
Get Ready for a Week of ‘Fake News’ Hysteria
Brace yourselves. In the coming days, we’re going to hear a lot about how “fake news” is now a mortal threat to all Americans.
A North Carolina man who sent customers and employees scrambling when he fired a gun inside a northwest Washington pizzeria Sunday told police he went there to investigate a fictitious online conspiracy theory involving the restaurant and high-ranking Democrats.
After his arrest, Welch told police he was there to investigate a fake news conspiracy theory known as “pizza gate” involving the pizzeria in the 5000 block of Connecticut Avenue NW. Posts to Facebook and Reddit claim Comet was the home base of a child sex abuse ring run by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her presidential campaign chair, John Podesta.
“What happened today demonstrates that promoting false and reckless conspiracy theories does come with consequences,” Comet Ping Pong owner James Alefantis said.
No two ways about it, a guy who goes into a restaurant and starts firing his gun all willy-nilly is a bad dude, and he ought to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
But now there’s going to be an eager effort to shift responsibility from him to whoever wrote about this restaurant. This guy sounds like he graduated from the Yosemite Sam School of Forensic Investigation, and if he hadn’t shown up at the doorstep of this restaurant, he would have shown up at the gate of Edwards Air Force Base asking about the aliens at Area 51 or stomped around the Pacific Northwest hunting Bigfoot. Blaming “fake news” implies a warning to everyone, “don’t write or say something that could set off some nut-job.” That argument assumes that there’s a rationality to the nut-job, and it’s our responsibility to not offer anything that could cause an irrational mind to lash out.
Unless, of course, you think the Southern Poverty Law Center is responsible for the guy who tried to shoot up the Family Research Center in Washington D.C. in 2012. That would-be-gunman “had stopped by Chick-fil-A to pick up 15 sandwiches, which he planned to smear in the dying faces of staffers.” He said he chose the FRC as a target because the Southern Poverty Law Center called the organization “a hate group.”
Rumors and false news reports can lead to violence, huh? You mean like the “hands up, don’t shoot” narrative that came out of Ferguson, Missouri?
What DOJ found made me ill. [Officer Darren] Wilson knew about the theft of the cigarillos from the convenience store and had a description of the suspects. [The late Michael] Brown fought with the officer and tried to take his gun. And the popular hands-up storyline, which isn’t corroborated by ballistic and DNA evidence and multiple witness statements, was perpetuated by Witness 101. In fact, just about everything said to the media by Witness 101, whom we all know as Dorian Johnson, the friend with Brown that day, was not supported by the evidence and other witness statements.
Oh, I get it. You meant completely different kinds of fake news, just the kinds you don’t like.
UPDATE: I’m getting pushback on this from folks I respect, but I’m still wary about this debate shifting from “online conspiracy theories are bad” to “online conspiracy theories are bad and something must be done about them.”
We all remember the Tucson shooter – a paranoid schizophrenic – being blamed on the map on Sarah Palin’s Facebook page, the Columbine shooters being allegedly driven by violent video games and movies, Oklahoma City being blamed on talk radio, etc. There’s this recurring pattern of looking beyond the perpetrator of a violent act — a series of actions that strikes me as inherently unhinged and irrational – and pointing to some other factor and saying, “ah-ha! That’s the REAL reason this occurred.”
Also, I keep hearing the Comet conspiracy theory reported as “fake news” — did anything resembling an actual news organization ever write about it? If not, then it is on par with aliens, black helicopters, and other conspiracy theories. There’s no broader lesson for actual news organizations. And the only way you’ll ever stop nut-jobs from trafficking in lunatic conspiracy theories is by shutting down the Internet.