The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

What Counts as ‘Misinformation’? (Hint: It Depends on Who Does the Counting)

Posted on | October 12, 2024 | No Comments

There IS a teleprompter!

Right-Wing Influencers Falsely
Accuse Kamala Harris Of Using
A Teleprompter At Town Hall
— Forbes

Posts falsely claim Kamala Harris
used teleprompter during town hall
— AFP

Harris Town Hall Moderator Debunks
Crazy New Teleprompter Claim
— Daily Beast

That’s just a small sample of what you’ll find with a Google search for “kamala univision town hall teleprompter,” and you won’t find anything except headlines like that — how it’s “false” and has been “debunked” — on the first page of search results. Or the second page, or the third page of results, for that matter. This is certainly not accidental:

Last week, MRC researchers found that Google buried US-based right-leaning news outlets on the 14th page of search results. It appears that the tech giant is still at it, as it continues to hide right-leaning outlets in the depths of search results.
On Oct. 8, MRC researchers once again used AllSides “right” and “left” bias classifications and found that Google search results for “kamala harris presidential race 2024” and “donald trump presidential race 2024” were stuffed with leftist, legacy media sources. The results featured outlets like CNN and The New York Times as well as publications of leftist billionaires like Jeff Bezos’s The Washington Post and Marc Benioff’s Time. When searching for the aforementioned Harris search prompt, researchers did not find any U.S.-based media outlets that AllSides rates as “lean-right” or “right” until Fox News appeared as the first result on page 11 of Google search results. Likewise, Google buried the first U.S.-based “lean right” or “right” result for the aforementioned Trump prompt as the sixth result on the 23rd page, as Google featured a Fox News video in this spot.

Google is running a Democratic Party propaganda operation, deliberately suppressing access to any information source that might contradict the preferred political narrative. Some stories — the ones most damaging to Democrats — are literally impossible to find using Google, and the only way anyone knows about these stories is because they go directly to the source (e.g., the UK Daily Mail, Gateway Pundit, etc.) or because they see it via social media. What does Google’s search-result suppression do? It divides the country into two groups — those who only know what Google wants them to know, and those who, for whatever reason, actively seek out alternative media sources. And this is a bad thing for democracy, because it breeds contempt and hostility between the two groups. Those who passively cooperate with this censorship regime (liberals, in general) look at the rest of us and think we’re a bunch of dangerous dimwits — “How can they possibly believe this stuff?” — while, at the same time, many on the right side of the digital divide become paranoid, or fall victim to genuinely dangerous peddlers of falsehood.

It’s the little boy who cried “wolf,” you see. When the self-appointed arbiters of truth — including Google — promote a one-sided narrative, and hurl accusations of “conspiracy theory” at anyone who disputes the narrative, why should anyone trust warnings about “misinformation” even if the warnings are valid? You can point to the “Russian collusion” hoax and the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story, and if the thing you’re excited about now happens to be false, who can you trust to warn you against it? The media have forfeited their credibility, and the consequences are that we don’t know who to trust anymore.

So, now about that Unavision town hall with Kamala:

Kamala Harris got caught using a teleprompter during Thursday night’s Univision town hall in Las Vegas.
Harris pandered to Latina voters by participating in a town hall hosted by Univision.
The internal polls for Harris must be horrific.
Of course, Kamala Harris had to use a teleprompter because she has no clue what she’s talking about.
Univision panicked after they realized they showed Kamala Harris’s teleprompter live on air. As soon as the camera panned behind Kamala Harris, the teleprompter went black.

There clearly is a teleprompter in front of Kamala as she’s speaking, and the screen does go black shortly after it appears on camera. Univision claims that the words on the teleprompter were actually for the introduction by the host of the town hall, Enrique Acevedo.

However, if you listen to what Kamala was saying during that segment, it is word-for-word the same stump-speech line included in her TV ads about how, when she was a prosecutor in Californiam, she never asked the victim of crime if they were Republican or Democrat: “The only question I ever asked is, ‘Are you OK?'” So if she’s not reading a script off a teleprompted, why does she sound completely scripted? (Just incidentally, not to get off on a sidetrack, that’s a dumb line. A prosecutor’s job isn’t to give crime victims sympathy, it’s to get criminals convicted in court.) Another video clip from the same event shows an audience member simultaneously mouthing the same words Kamala was speaking (about how Trump “filed for bankruptcy six times”):

Quite obviously, the audience was a fake as Kamala herself — the Harris campaign brought in “plants” for what was supposed to be a town hall with regular voters and, whether or not Kamala was actually reading from a teleprompter, her message was sufficiently scripted that some of her listeners already knew it by heart. So what the media are doing, by accusing “right-wing influencers” of promoting a “crazy” and “debunked” narrative is . . . Well, for lack of a better word, it’s misinformation.

In conclusion, consider what Hillary Clinton said a week ago in a CNN interview about social media platforms, “if they don’t moderate and monitor the content, we lose total control.” This seems like a confession that Democrats want “total control” of what we’re allowed to say, what we’re allowed to read, what we’re allowed to watch. One of the ways that in which that control is exercised is by Democrats (and the media, but I repeat themselves) arrogating to themselves the authority to decide what constitutes truth, and what counts as “misinformation.”



 

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Category: Election, Kamala Harris, Media Bias

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