{"id":19722,"date":"2016-12-13T10:50:13","date_gmt":"2016-12-13T17:50:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=19722"},"modified":"2016-12-13T10:53:03","modified_gmt":"2016-12-13T17:53:03","slug":"tuesday-bag-o-bs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=19722","title":{"rendered":"Tuesday Bag o’ BS"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"no_bullshit_tote_bag\"Am I a bad man if I don’t buy\u00a0the story of the\u00a0terminally-ill boy who died\u00a0in Santa’s arms<\/a>? That\u00a0heart-rending bit of clickbait\u00a0was all over Facebook and Twitter yesterday. I knew it was bullshit but clicked on it anyway. Turns out\u00a0there’s only one source for the story, that source being the man who plays Santa. A gullible reporter from the Knoxville News Sentinel in Tennessee wrote down Santa’s self-aggrandizing tale and the paper printed it. The BBC picked it up and now it’s everywhere.<\/p>\n

In September, I wrote about another bogus story<\/a> flooding the internet: a strange burka-clad woman\u00a0emerged from\u00a0the woods next to a Trump supporter’s home in Lawrenceville, Georgia, ripped down the family’s\u00a0American flag, then attacked them with it in their driveway. The only source for that story was the homeowner himself, but the local Fox affiliate\u00a0reported it as news, and the next day NPR’s Morning Edition<\/a>\u00a0repeated it word-for-word.<\/p>\n

The story of Sherri Papini’s mysterious kidnapping in Redding, California, is still unfolding. And boy is it unfolding<\/a>!<\/p>\n

I can’t imagine life without a functioning bullshit detector. If we didn’t have the ability to think critically, it would be almost impossible to distinguish legitimate from bogus news, what with the media indiscriminately passing on everything they hear. Last month a quote from Ivanka Trump—\u201cIf he wasn\u2019t my father, I would spray him with Mace.”—made the rounds on CBS News, Esquire, the Daily Mail, the New York Daily News, and The Hill, among many others. Turns out Ivanka never said that<\/a>. I ask you, without critical thinking skills, without built-in bullshit detectors, how can we ever spot fake news? The media certainly isn’t going to do it for us! <\/p>\n

All this week I’ve been seeing outraged Tweets and Facebook posts chiding the Los Angeles Times for racist statements in an article they published. Here’s one example, from Twitter:<\/p>\n

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