The Splice Job

This is why I read blogs. They relentlessly set the record straight when mainstream news outlets will not.

A few months ago, the MSM and the blogosphere alike were frenzied over the story of the undercover pimp and whore team seemingly getting ill-conceived advice from ACORN on how to setup a brothel. The pimp was played by James O'Keefe, and the whore was played by Hannah Giles, and their infamous tapes were mostly horseshit -- highly doctored and overdubbed horseshit. In fact, O'Keefe had a history of out-of-context edits in his horseshit "documentaries."

But what made the story so sensational was the absurd 70's-era pimp costume. How could low-level ACORN employees be so gullible? Well, The Brad Blog has been uncovering the truth for the last few weeks: O'Keefe never dressed as a pimp in the offices of ACORN. He wore a dress shirt and khaki pants.

Everybody was duped including Congress which temporarily cut funding for ACORN.

Giles wants to call the pimp costume footage b-roll, but the pure fiction was promulgated over and over again for months by the mainstream news outlets and O'Keefe himself.

The result of these lies and video edits was a successful piece of propaganda to discredit and vilify a community organization that helps poor people by advocating for affordable housing, affordable healthcare, higher minimum wages, and better schools.

The New York Times has been particularly bull-headed in their refusal to retract their multiple erroneous reports on the subject. In a letter to a Brad Blog reader, Times' Sr. Editor Greg Brock wrote, "If there is a correction to be made, it seems it would start with Mr. O'Keefe himself. We believe him. Therefore there is nothing for us to correct."

Which leaves me pondering, who should get my coveted Porkpuller Prize for weakest effort in journalism? The New York Times? Or James O'Keefe for his blatant and unethical splice job?

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We Interrupt this Program...

On October 30, 1938, the Martians invaded New Jersey.

Since I thought hoax week 2009 was so much fun, I decided to experience the greatest hoax of them all: Orson Welles' radio broadcast of The War of The Worlds. I put the mp3 on my iPod and listened to it alone in the dark...

It starts off as a dance music broadcast -- or at least what they called dance music back then. But the party is interrupted by an Intercontinental Radio News report of enormous blue flames shooting out of Mars. Then, minutes later, another report that a meteor has fallen to Earth! Then, a minute later, reporters are ready at the scene for continuous coverage of the meteor. But then the meteor starts to open! It's really a spaceship, and it has tentacles!

"Good heavens -- something's wriggling out of the shadow," the fake newscaster reported. "It glistens like wet leather. But that face -- it… it is indescribable."

The whole thing is so not scary. The timeline alone is unbelievable. I guess it's just one of those things where you had to be there in the 30's, listening to the miracle of modern radio and trusting -- trusting that this was an urgent news bulletin and taking it all as fact. These people weren't stupid, but the world outside our own atmosphere had not been demystified yet. So thousands of listeners panicked:

Believing that the nation had been invaded by Martians, many listeners panicked. Some people loaded blankets and supplies in their cars and prepared to flee. One mother in New England reportedly packed her babies and lots of bread into a car, figuring that "if everything is burning, you can't eat money, but you can eat bread." Other people hid in cellars, hoping that the poisonous gas would blow over them. One college senior drove forty-five miles at breakneck speed in a valiant attempt to save his girlfriend.

But still, there is the annoying detail that during the broadcast there were three announcements stating that this was a dramatization of The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells. The newspaper that day had also listed the program as an adaptation of the book.

Could it be that the reports of mass panic are also a hoax?

But historians also claim that newspaper accounts over the following week greatly exaggerated the hysteria. There are estimates that about 20 percent of those listening believed it was real. That translates to less than a million people.

At the time, newspapers considered radio an upstart rival. Some in the print press, resentful of the superior radio coverage during the Munich crisis, may have sought to prove a point about the irresponsibility of the radio broadcast.

Somehow I'll sleep a little better knowing common sense prevailed during that historic misunderstanding. However, I'm still greatly disturbed over the dangerous crap that educated people are willing to believe today.

Time Out

It must be hoax week.

I was feeling a sort of primal rage as I read this mother's blog post titled TSA agents took my son. The post recounts a terrifying incident where a mother carried her infant son through a metal detector at Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson airport and the baby's pacifier clip set off an alarm which then set off a series of shocking events. TSA agents did what nobody should ever attempt with any human or animal -- they took her child. They carried him away out of her sight, and as she screamed, all other security agents ignored her.

Separating a parent from his or her child is explicitly against TSA rules, but I have such a low opinion of airport security that I would not doubt the incompetence. I started to wonder if maybe there was a farm where TSA employees are bred and emerge from their pods looking exactly like humans but devoid of emotions.

But then TSA did something sensible and responded to the story with their own blog post which includes an 11 minute CCTV video of the incident. And it's not at all likes the mother's story!

We see her carry the child through the detector. She's still clutching the child as she waits inside some kind of dehumanizing acrylic holding cell (really, what the hell are those things?). Once security agents are ready to deal with her, she takes a seat still holding her child. Then it appears that an agent pats down the child while he is still on the mother's lap. Then the mother herself places the infant in his stroller and sits back down no more than two feet away from him. The agents take their sweet time patting down the mother, but finally both mother and son are free to go.

We have heard how eyewitness testimony can be unreliable, but this unreliable? Really? Somebody can't accurately remember their own personal experience 24 hours after the event?

I know that recent news stories (balloon boy, I'm looking at you now) don't merit hundreds of hours of MSM coverage, but they do serve as a real world MacGuffin -- something that catches our attention but is not the pertinent part of the story.

The issue here is that in the current era of reality television, some parents will lie, scheme, and shamelessly exploit their own children and the sympathy of others for a fleeting taste of fame and fortune.

Letters from Wingnutistan

I have a distant cousin who forwards every viral email my way. I've written some careful GMail filters to trash anything he sends that starts with "Fwd." It seems to be working. I haven't heard from him in years.

But sometimes there's a friend you'd rather educate than censor. You spend the better part of an hour researching and delicately wording a rebuttal to his or her nonsense. For years Snopes.com has been an amazing ally in this fight.

But now there's a little more help in the political arena. Media Matters has unveiled Email Checker which will help you reply to the conservative misinformation contained in the most common and most egregious chain and viral emails.

I like the way they word their ready-made responses. They're gentle enough even for your grandma. A typical response contains something like, "If this one were true, I'd be pretty upset - so I decided to see if I could find out for myself..."

That's probably the best approach. Almost makes me want to pull a couple of my cousin's emails out of the trash bin... Nah.

The Great Egress

Let's go to the circus, and see The Great Egress. The signs indicate something stunning, and the arrows point the way. The crowd follows, whispering rumors about the fascinating secrets of the Egress. They go through the doors, and end up outside. There they see a sign with the definition of egress: "1) The action or right of going or coming out. 2) a place or means of going out." And now everybody has to pay 25 cents to get back in.

There is no proof that P.T. Barnum ever said "there's a sucker born every minute," but he did say "every crowd has a silver lining." The man would still profit brilliantly today...

Just tell people you have a shocking video of a living, breathing space alien, and watch the bloggers and mainstream media swarm to you. Better yet, claim you are a former CIA analyst with a scandalous video featuring a politician or his wife (as I laughed about earlier this week), and watch your web traffic skyrocket.

The profit is more than monetary if one has a political agenda. Because the rumors, embellishments, and lies grow as we head down the dark corridor towards the egress. The damage is done long before we reach the door.

The world has fallen for many hoaxes both political and scientific. A hoax usually sounds like it has some kind of credibility by association, has some technical sounding language, and often enough, the artifact or video never even surfaces.

As we head out the exit this time, the sign will say "Oh, grow up!"