Posted on July 14,
2017
Assumed News
The Times’
pathetic excuse for slander
by
Daniel
Clark
By now, everyone is familiar with the phrase, “fake
news,” which was first used by the mainstream media to refer to internet hoaxsters, but has since been turned on them by President
Trump, about whom their coverage has often been wildly inaccurate. Less attention is paid to the more pervasive
problem of assumed news, in which the
media reference things that they just assume to be true, without having
challenged their assumptions with so much as a simple keyword search.
A prime example of this can be seen in The New York Times’ response to a
defamation lawsuit filed against them by former vice presidential candidate
Sarah Palin. In a June 14th
editorial ostensibly about the shooting of Republican congressman Steve Scalise, the Times
repeated the famously debunked assertion that Jared Loughner,
who shot Democrat congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in
2011, was inspired by Palin’s “heated political rhetoric.” The editorial claimed that Palin’s political
action committee had released a map with Giffords,
among other politicians, in crosshairs like those seen through the scope of a
rifle.
In
fact, Palin’s map had only put the crosshairs on political districts, to signify that they were being “targeted” for defeat. Furthermore, the former Alaska governor would
have been the last person to hold sway over Loughner,
a drug-addled, misogynistic, anti-religious 9/11 “truther,”
who despised George W. Bush, fantasized about killing policemen, and wanted the
phrase “In God We Trust” removed from our currency.
While Loughner’s politics
tended to be Leftist, he was so generally detached from reality that it
wouldn’t be responsible to implicate anybody but himself in his actions. His writings reveal an obsession with
“conscious dreaming,” a state of consciousness in which a person is supposedly
able to control his dreams, as if he were directing and starring in his own
movie. Acquaintances worried that he had
been living in “alternative realities” and “dream worlds.” He attended one of Giffords’
Q&A sessions, at which he spilled the following blender full of unrelated
question parts: “If words could not be understood, then what does government
mean?” Her failure to recognize the
brilliance of this evidently infuriated him.
This may sound like an open-and-shut case in Palin’s
favor, except that it is extremely difficult for a public figure to win a
defamation case, because of the need to prove malice by the offending
party. The burden is on Palin to
demonstrate not only that the accusation was false, but that the Times knew it was false, and printed it
with the specific intention of harming her.
Making it even harder is that the Times
is actually using its malice as an excuse for its behavior, and somewhat
convincingly so.
The
Times editors are calling their
baseless claims an “honest mistake,” but there’s only one way for that to be plausible. They remembered the original accusation that
had been made against Palin, and just assumed it to be true. They probably ignored the facts about the Giffords shooting at the time, and couldn’t be bothered to
look them up before publishing their op-ed.
So, yes, they’re malicious, but they didn’t knowingly print what was
untrue; hence, there’s no defamation.
As in this case, assumed news generally doesn’t
involve recent events, but instead reinforces liberal narratives about the
past, especially by painting unflattering pictures of people liberals
hate. The Times editorial isn’t the first time Palin has been smeared with Giffords’ shooting, nor will it be the last. More responsible editors facetiously refer to
such a story as “too good to check.” News
consumers repeatedly read such a claim, or hear it on TV, and naturally accept
it as factual.
How many people, for example, are totally convinced
that Richard Nixon became president by employing a racist “Southern Strategy,”
that the Reagans were freeloaders who let their Hollywood friends buy them a
mansion when they left Washington, that Dan Quayle received special treatment
that allowed him to join the National Guard, that the Supreme Court selected
George W. Bush as president, and that Sarah Palin said she could see Washington
from her house? Each of these falsehoods
has been maliciously passed along countless times as assumed news.
Liberals tend not to check these stories, because
these are things they assume everyone just knows. Of course Sarah Palin is a bloodthirsty
extremist who encourages her deranged supporters to gun down kindly Democrats. Doesn’t everyone just know that? So why bother checking? All that might do is transform an “honest
mistake” into a prima facie case of defamation.
The Shinbone: The
Frontier of the Free Press