Politics

CNN hack cheers HuffPost writer who wrongly identified Ark. prof as Charlottesville racist — Video

Apparently, propagandists at CNN don’t care if innocent people are harassed, smeared or threatened as a result of irresponsible people who themselves don’t seem to give a damn about getting their facts straights.

On Tuesday, Breitbart reported that CNN’s Brooke Baldwin interviewed Logan Smith, the Huffington Post contributor who incorrectly identified an Arkansas professor as being one of those who marched with white nationalists in Charlottesville.  At the end of the interview, Baldwin cheered Smith by saying, “You know what? Good on you, Logan Smith.”

Here’s a video of the interview:

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Earlier Tuesday, Susan Swift reported:

A left-wing HuffPost contributor employed at Progress North Carolina Action as its “Comms Director” is orchestrating a campaign to publicly identify people who attended the “United The Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia last week. His goal is workplace retaliation: to identify and “dox” so-called racists in order to hurt them financially by getting them fired from their jobs, reports Buzzfeed’s Kevin Collier.

The Twitter account @YesYoureRacist crowdsourced names of those attending the Charlottesville rally, asking his 364k followers to help identify photos of rally participants several of which were retweeted tens of thousands of times.

Kyle Quinn was 1,100 miles away enjoying dinner with his wife during the Charlottesville confrontation but Quinn apparently didn’t bother to fact-check his information.  After all, the two men sorta-kinda resembled each other and that was apparently all it took for this “sleuth” to conclude that Quinn was his man.

As the New York Times reported:

A man at the rally had been photographed wearing an “Arkansas Engineering” shirt, and the amateur investigators found a photo of Mr. Quinn that looked somewhat similar. They were both bearded and had similar builds.

By internet frenzy standards, that was proof enough.

And that was all it took for insane liberal hatemongers to strike.

The Times added:

Fearing for their safety, he and his wife stayed with a colleague this weekend.

“You have celebrities and hundreds of people doing no research online, not checking facts,” he said. “I’ve dedicated my life to helping all people, trying to improve health care and train the next generation of scientists, and this is potentially throwing a wrench in that.”

For someone whose only sin was a passing resemblance to someone else — the actual man in the Charlottesville photo has not been conclusively identified — Mr. Quinn bore the direct consequences of the reckless spread of misinformation in breaking news, a common ritual in modern news events.

And this is what Baldwin cheered.  It’s possible that she may not have known about Quinn, but she never bothered to ask Smith the most important question: “Are you absolutely certain the people you’re identifying were actually at the rally?”

That, apparently, never occurred to her.

No doubt, Smith now feels empowered to “out” others as allegedly being at Charlottesville, whether they actually were or not.  And it’s clear CNN doesn’t care.

The Times properly observed:

As for Mr. Quinn, the University of Arkansas professor, he fell victim to a resemblance to one of the rally participants, but the possibility that he was there wouldn’t have held up with more careful checking, Mr. Decker said. Such mistakes routinely happen during amateur sleuthing, he said.

“There’s ostensibly a very quick jump into the first detail that emerges,” he said.

People who then try to correct the record often feel drowned out by the false information.

Mark Popejoy, an art director in Bentonville, Ark., attempted to correct dozens of Twitter accounts that had inaccurately pegged Mr. Quinn as the Charlottesville rally participant. He would point out that the University of Arkansas had confirmed that Mr. Quinn was not involved, and ask that the Twitter users delete their erroneous tweets.

While some appreciated the new information, others adamantly refused to change their minds, he said in an interview on Monday. He said he didn’t know Mr. Quinn but sympathized with his position.

“I think it’s dangerous just to go out accusing people without any kind of confirmation of who they are,” he said. “It can ruin people’s lives.”

Baldwin should know this, working for CNN.  Smith should also know this, being a contributor at the Huffington Post.  But knowing and doing are two different things.  And it seems that after Charlottesville, facts no longer matter — only the radical left-wing narrative.

Incidents like this, by the way, are the reason a number of people now view CNN as the least-trusted name in network news, according to the results of a study published by the Washington Free Beacon in January.

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Banned: How Facebook enables militant Islamic jihad
Banned: How Facebook enables militant Islamic jihad – Source: Author (used with permission)

Joe Newby

A 10-year veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps, Joe ran for a city council position in Riverside, Calif., in 1991 and managed successful campaigns for the Idaho state legislature. Co-author of "Banned: How Facebook enables militant Islamic jihad," Joe wrote for Examiner.com from 2010 until it closed in 2016 and his work has been published at Newsbusters, Spokane Faith and Values and other sites. He now runs the Conservative Firing Line.

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