Here Is Today’s Case Study in Right-Wing Media Virtue and Rectitude
Mother Jones
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A friend of mine watches Fox News so I don’t have to,1 and he says they’ve been practically wetting their pants over the story of Hillary Clinton’s campaign calling the founder of the Laugh Factory and threatening to sue him if he didn’t take down a short video compilation of Hillary jokes.
What’s that? This already sounds really unlikely? I guess so. It sure doesn’t seem very smart for a highly visible presidential candidate, does it? Still, Judicial Watch says it happened, and Fox and Rush and Sean are all over it too. So I guess it must be true. They wouldn’t just make stuff up, would they?
Well, sure they would. What happened, according to Jamie Masada, founder of the Laugh Factory, is that a few days ago he got a comically threatening phone call from someone named “John.” And that’s it. John never said he was with the Clinton campaign. John never called back. Masada never told Judicial Watch about it. In other words, there’s almost literally nothing there.
But apparently some Laugh Factory employee heard about the call, and somehow it went from there to Judicial Watch. Or something. Who knows, really? What we do know is that apparently no one bothered calling Masada to check up on this story—that would have run the risk of ruining it, after all—and now it’s all over conservative media. Michelle Goldberg comments:
What we have here is a small-scale demonstration of how the Hillary smear sausage gets made. It starts with a claim that’s ambiguous at best, fabricated at worst, and then interpreted in the most invidious possible light. The claim is reported in one outlet and amplified on Twitter. Other outlets then report on the report, repeating the claim over and over again. Talk radio picks it up. Maybe Fox News follows. Eventually the story achieves a sort of ubiquity in the right-wing media ecosystem, which makes it seem like it’s been confirmed. Soon it becomes received truth among conservatives, and sometimes it even crosses into the mainstream media. If you watched the way the Clintons were covered in the 1990s, you know the basics of this process. If you didn’t, you’re going to spend the next year—and maybe the next nine years—learning all about it.
And there you have it. This is where Mena airport and Vince Foster and Whitewater and the Clinton death list and all the other charming inventions of the Clinton smear squad came from. Seems like only yesterday.
1Not really. Believe it or not, it’s part of his job.
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Here Is Today’s Case Study in Right-Wing Media Virtue and Rectitude
