It’s really difficult to analogize accurately. Point is that the modern media is built around sound bites, and they are frequently inaccurate portrayals even when done by more reputable outfits. How harshly one judges their choices on a spectrum between bias and efficiency frequently has as much to do with the personal beliefs of the observer as with anything else. Breitbart just takes this to an illogical, unethical extreme, but typically it’s not something that’s completely made up from start to finish.
That’s what I mean by grain of truth. In this case it’s not as easy as the Sherrod thing to instantly infer what the trickery was, so you see otherwise reasonable people falling into the “asking questions” spiral alongside the usual gang of idiots.
My take on this is that Breitbart is a proven dishonest scumbag and not to be trusted. That’s slightly different from a “random Republican”. Not by much. rimshot But it’s different.
That said, I have to agree the interview Weiner gave hurt him lots. He is acting guilty even if he isn’t.
In conclusion, who cares? Sure I’d be railing more if it was some right-wing, anti-sex ed, homophobic conservative here rather than a liberal guy from New York. The hypocrisy factor is a big deal for me. But the girl’s not underage and, frankly, her letter in response is the main reason I’m not assuming Weiner is guilty. It’s a very frank and genuine sounding denial that she’s involved with the guy.
Plus Jon Stewart swore his penis isn’t that big on The Daily Show last night. I’m not gonna ask how he’d know though.
What? No. That’s ridiculous. Breitbart is a known fabricator. Deliberately releasing misleading or doctored information is something he’s been proven to have done. The existence of Breitbart as the source makes the whole thing fishy as hell.
I cannot fathom how this isn’t the critical element of this whole silly mess: The whole thing comes from a known liar who makes up stuff and deliberately deceives people in order to build his hit-piece narratives. His politics are irrelevant, he’s not a real journalist.
The problem being that the existence of this thing is trivially verifiable. “There’s a picture on this guy’s thing on some social network” is not a difficult fact to check, historically or otherwise. While the context can be mutilated (say, dude was trying to send his smokin’ hot wife a picture of his throbbing knob and punched the wrong buttons in a haze of lust), there’s not any context to the story at this point, and nobody has yet said that the essential fact is not true. Weiner says he was hacked - not that the dick never happened. Even if you think that the guy has no credibility, his credibility isn’t relevant here because you’re not taking anything on his credibility. Breitbart can be as much of an asshole as he wants, but he’s an aside to the story.
That’s simply not true. When someone has a proven track record of accepting stories that are purposefully manipulative far beyond even the modest threshold of integrity that the average media organization has, it’s not an aside.
Well you can examine exif data, and also wonder why a Congressman would use a public hosting service to host the image under his real account name. Unless he was completely wasted anyway.
The one thing that really set off conspiracy bells is that the one single person who retweeted the tweet before it was deleted has had lots of prior twitter conversations with and about the young lady that was the intended target of the photo.
Quit playing hide the sausage with the facts. We have the schlong, we know its provenance, and we are eager to clamp down and bring this thing to a quick conclusion before it blows up in the face of more individuals.
It’s about time someone took a stance and really bit down on the shafting the American public is getting from our Congress people and their playboy ways.
If you have to parse a point of contention. The only contentious point between Breitbart and every other person writing about the topic and not alleging a conspiracy is the blank outrage. So, fine - dump the outrage. The only other thing he’s brought aside from some vague threats about other less flattering images he’s got keistered that I see no reason to believe he actually has is a piece of verifiable, factual, concrete evidence. Jenny McCarthy is a twit, but if she weighs a rock in front of me and shows me that it’s five pounds and then lets me look at the rock and weigh it myself, I’ve got no reason to doubt that the rock is five pounds.
I guess the question is, what other thing are we being suspicious about in this case? I’ve read the story at a few sites and all I can find are a windbag being outraged at another man’s theoretical choice of underwear (irrelevant) and a basic point of fact (not in dispute). Is he saying something else that I just haven’t run across? I mean, I’m not ruling out that the greaseball could have paid some stooge to hack the account and start the story, but that IS evidence that we don’t have yet (though it’s certainly an area to investigate, given the man’s history), and I can’t see anything else that Breitbart’s credibility would have any influence on. It looks the same to me as people impugning the health effects of aspartame because Donald Rumsfeld was the CEO for the company that invented it when it was invented.
The point of contention is that no one reporting on it has the slightest idea what they are talking about, they just think/hope/pray that this smoke has some fire to it and keep repeating accusations and vague “well if it’s not true then why aren’t you ___” as if the onus was on Weiner to tell the story for them. If they have one, spit it out. So far it’s all been phantom mistresses and imaginary legions of young ladies being i-molested in Breitbart’s imagination. The Breitbart angle matters just as the McCarthy angle would, because it’s never going to be a situation of weighing a rock. It’s going to be something attached to their agenda that is likely only true if you ignore context, with that likelihood having been established by their pattern of conduct.
If that’s not the case, then let’s see the news come up with it. But until someone who has credibility as a journalist takes it apart and uses actual journalism with the problem at hand, it’s going to be very difficult to take it seriously.
I too am hoping like hell that this story conceals a giant load. Of entertainment. Thus far, reporters have only been uncovering the tip of the true possibilities here. If they really got to the meat of things, and it turns out there’s a real story deep inside, we could be in for one wild and entertaining ride.
Brian. I’ll try to make this clearer and simpler: Breitbart has a history of smearing liberal targets by fabricating things. Therefore, if Breitbart reports that Weiner posted his dick, and Weiner says his account was hacked, then I want to find out (if the account was indeed hacked) if Breitbart had any connection to the hackers.
Or if, because of his complete lack of journalistic ethics, he ran with a story he knew to be fishy, on the assumption that he could do his damage whether or not it was shown to be fake later.
It’s like a known art forger (or an art dealer with a known history of selling forgeries as the real thing) suddenly came forward and claimed he’d found a new, undiscovered Van Gogh. It would be insane not to seriously investigate the source as much as you investigate the piece of art itself.
Is it strange that you’re not the first to suggest an exorcism?
If anything, I should look into an upgrade of my demonic possessors. After all, just look at the antics of the Congressfolk. I can’t compete with nude Reps in bathrooms selling sex, I just can’t. =(
So has nobody actually done the completely trivial job of verifying that the event actually happened? It would seem that Weiner’s reaction that “he was hacked” is itself a confirmation that the picture does exist and was appended to his account, but calls into question the actual source of the image. If that’s the case, then I would think we should be discussing how somebody hacked a prominent federal legislator’s social media accounts and maybe finding the person responsible for the suspicious dickery and bringing down the hammer of justice. Or have none of the news services that have done second-tier reporting on this bothered to verify the basic facts of the matter?
I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised if that’s the case, but I’d much rather believe in a world where journalists do at least SOME fact checking before they report.
I like how Breitbart doesn’t say so many things on CNN:
I’m not saying what type of relationship that Congressman Weiner has been having with women, young women that claim to have relationships with him.
I’m not saying what types of relationships but people that Rep Weiner follows are quite young,younger than the girl in question, talk openly about Weiner and who he follows.
