Tuesday, April 28, 2015
Power Line Pundit, Hinderaker, Pwnd!
TPM Interview: Rightwing Blogger Explains How He Got Punked By Phony Harry Reid Rumor
John Hinderaker, the man behind the rightwing blog Power Line, woke up to a nasty surprise on Sunday morning.
In the pages of the Las Vegas Sun, a man named Larry Pfeifer announced that he had successfully duped a conservative blogger into running a story that Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid's recent injuries to his eyes and face were the result of a dustup with his own family.
Hinderaker would have recognized Pfeifer's name; he had published Pfeifer's account on Power Line only a few weeks earlier. Initially sporting the alias "Easton Elliott," Pfeifer had approached Hinderaker claiming that he witnessed Reid's brother, Larry, talk about pummeling a family member while sharing at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. (Eventually, Pfeifer told Hinderaker his real name.)
Hinderaker published the story on Power Line on April 3. Before long, the fake story was blasted over the airwaves by Rush Limbaugh and picked up by Breitbart News and WND. (WND's headline: "Was Harry Reid really pummeled by a relative?") Hinderaker even brought “Easton Elliott” on as a guest when he filled in as host on Laura Ingraham's show on April 9.
Did any of these bloggers and pundits bother to check on the veracity of the story?
Here's how the crazies on the right get their news. They find some rumor on the internet from their crazy uncle's email, or someone who will feed them a rumor, and the suckers run with it. Why bother to check if it's true or not when the story fits their Obama/Reid/Pelosi/Hillary-hating narrative?
They were had, and they deserve to be mocked to the moon and back. This is ample evidence of their total lack of interest in truth or checking for facts. As long as the rumor slams a Democrat, it's true for them.
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8 comments:
Here's how the crazies on the right get their news.
Fortunately not all conservatives are crazy. It does seem as those who have been infected with the Tea Party virus tend to tilt toward the crazy. Note Beck, Levin, Palin, Nugent, et all.
Isn't there an old saying, 'one bad apple can spoil the whole bunch?' Seems Pfeiffer is a bit of a bad apple as well. Just sayin...
The "Liberal Media" lie the right whines about:
"At the heart of the conservative outrage industry, of course, is Fox News. Fox’s role as an ideological platform is unparalleled in modern American history. Its leading hosts reach audiences that dwarf their competitors’. The network plays a dominant role for its audience that is unique. And Fox is also distinguished by extraordinarily tight connections to the Republican Party—linkages, again, that have no parallel among Democrats.
What’s most remarkable is that Fox is just the beginning. The other citadel of the conservative media empire is talk radio, and if cable news looks like a lopsided teeter-totter, talk radio is that teeter-totter with a 16-ton weight attached to the right-hand side. Conservative on-air minutes outnumber liberal ones by a ratio of at least 10 to 1, and all of the major nationally syndicated shows are conservative. Just the top three have a combined weekly audience of more than 30 million. Moreover, the number of talk radio stations has tripled in the last 15 years.
The Goopers are champions at propaganda and spreading lies.
I think what is unnerving about the right wing extremists is that so many of them willingly swallow any scrap of misinformation that FOX News or the swine on right wing talk radio feed them.
They have a world view that doesn't allow reality to leak into it. They're all in a toxic bubble of victimization and they're out of touch with the rest of America.
To be fair, at least some right wing pundits and bloggers did say they could not vouch for the veracity of the story.
But, and this is a big but, if you are not going to fact check, you are just passing on gossip.
Just because you want it to be true, or believe it plausible, does not make it so.
I've seen this numerous times on some of the blogs we read, and where we are barred from commenting, no matter how civilly we write.
I've privately written some of them, showing their posts to be false and have received pushback saying essentially facts be damned, the idea is true. Or, it could be true. Or maybe they have just chosen to publish "false facts."
Granted, those of us who comment here are libs. We don't shy from that reality, but no one who comports themselves in an adult manner [no swearing, name calling, ad hominem attacks, etc] is welcome to join in.
Even those with contrary view points. Just bring verifiable truth, links and be honest...
Anyone who has any sense and reads the crap produced on those blogs, Breitbart? World Net Daily, understands how out of touch they are. But they really believe the rest of America shares their bigotry.
Their hatred of all things Obama is pathological. They feed off of that hatred and spread it around like so much manure hoping that it will produce ever stronger stalks of malignant rage.
Read their blogs and you'll find an encyclopedia of bigotry, hatred, and paranoia, and all of them congratulating themselves on their keen insights into how President Obama thinks. When in fact those opinions are nothing more than the product of fear and ignorance AND SHOUTING CAPITALS!
Did any of these bloggers and pundits bother to check on the veracity of the story?
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Bit rhetorical today?
Of course the answer is, no.
The fringe right blogs just keep pumping it out. Never admitting error and accepted as gospel by many on the right.
I don't think their complete solution to the situation in Baltimore is in yet but you can bet the libtards did it.
An example of the baggot attitude toward facts and reality:
A caller to a radio show on the Sandy Hook school shooting said he thought Obama had somehow engineered the shooting to help himself get re-elected.
The radio host pointed out that the shooting happened after the election.
The caller responded: "That's your opinion."
(Source)
Don't be surprised if Pfeiffer's fake story keeps cropping up here and there for years as something real. Recently I've had a number of opportunities to respond to Republicans talking about Benghazi by citing your link about the seven Republican-led inquiries that found no wrongdoing. In every case, the person did not even acknowledge or address the link and continued to insist that Benghazi was a real scandal.
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