{"id":19792,"date":"2016-12-23T09:58:18","date_gmt":"2016-12-23T16:58:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=19792"},"modified":"2016-12-27T14:25:08","modified_gmt":"2016-12-27T21:25:08","slug":"lying-liars-of-the-left","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=19792","title":{"rendered":"Lying Liars of the Left? (Updated)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fake news? Both sides do it!<\/p>\n

I hate “both sides” bullshit, but sometimes it’s true. This alarming headline from yesterday and today, for example, spread all over news sites and social media:<\/p>\n

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The story originated early Thursday on the notorious white supremacist site Breitbart News, where the emphasis was on how an\u00a0evil Jewish family shut down a high school production of A Christmas Carol by lodging a complaint over Tiny Tim’s closing line, “God bless us everyone.” That’s the version of the story\u00a0spread on the right. Later, lefty sites and media picked it up, changing the emphasis by reporting that the family in question had been threatened and forced to flee.<\/p>\n

Then, sometime yesterday afternoon, the Anti-Defamation League debunked both the conservative and liberal versions of the story. The school had indeed canceled the production, but the family had nothing to do with that. Nor had the family fled.<\/p>\n

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Thing is, as of this morning Talking Points Memo and other lefty news sites\u00a0are still flogging the story with yesterday’s\u00a0lying headline. You don’t get the truth\u00a0until you click on the\u00a0lie, and how many readers ever click? Most of us\u00a0just skim the headlines, and most of us\u00a0probably still believe a Jewish family was forced to flee its home.<\/p>\n

If all you did this week was skim headlines, you probably believe a group of young men was\u00a0forced off a Delta flight for speaking Arabic. You probably believe anonymous thugs chanting “Trump, Trump” ripped the hijab off a Muslim woman’s head in New York City. Both stories were breathlessly flogged on news sites and social media. Both\u00a0stories were lies: the men on the plane\u00a0provoked the incident for a YouTube video; the woman made up the thug\u00a0story to avoid punishment from strict parents after missing curfew. How many of us ever saw the retractions?<\/p>\n

It’s wrong for lying liars on the right to lie. It’s equally wrong for lying liars on the left to lie\u00a0… wronger, because our cause is\u00a0justice, and truth is indivisible from justice.<\/p>\n

That’s the long-term arc of justice argument. Here’s a more practical, immediate reason we shouldn’t copy the right’s “big lie” tactics: one false hate crime claim knocks the legs out from under a\u00a0hundred true ones. After this week’s hate crime stories were debunked, I’m going to be skeptical of any and all\u00a0future hate crime claims, even though most of them will turn out to be\u00a0true.<\/p>\n

Update<\/strong> (12\/27\/16):<\/em> Josh Marshall, senior editor of Talking Points Memo, is sticking with the “Jewish Family Forced to Flee” story I commented on at the top of this post. In a blog post<\/a> he examines discrepancies between\u00a0the story as first reported and the Anti-Defamation League’s rebuttal.\u00a0It turns out the original story is hardly “fake news,” and that the ADL’s rebuttal amounts to hair-splitting. Here are the main points:<\/p>\n