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Wednesday, Apr 8, 2015 3:58 PM UTC
The “Liberal Media Conspiracy” on steroids: Inside the right’s favorite new talking point
Rape. Inequality. Police violence: None of these things actually exist — at least if you work for Fox News!
Topics: Media Criticism, Fox News, Ann Coulter, Brit Hume, Rape, Campus rape, Income inequality, tax dodging, police abuse, UVA, Rolling Stone, News, Politics News
The journalism community is reeling this week after the release of a Columbia Journalism Review report on Rolling Stone’s now-infamous UVA rape story. And, whatever else might be said on the matter, you cannot escape the fact that this is one case where hand-wringing and soul-searching actually is called for. This story has cast a black shadow over journalism and set back hard-won progress in recent years in bringing the crime of campus rape out of the shadows.
Oddly enough, conservatives are celebrating with high fives and wild excitement. Their happiness at the retraction of this story doesn’t appear to be based upon the singular idea that an injustice was done to particular individuals, or that a fine public university’s reputation (ahem) was wrongly besmirched. (Although they do pay lip service to that.) In reality, conservative jubilation over the Rolling Stone debacle is about something altogether more discomfiting: They evidently have staked out the position that rape doesn’t happen very often and that women routinely lie about it. They are saying that the idea of rape being a problem on campus is a false “liberal narrative.”
This is just one of a handful of recent controversies that are being bundled into a new meme about liberal lies and false narratives. Here’s the thoughtful conservative pundit Ann Coulter with a short list:
Many months, several million wasted taxpayer dollars and one cop’s career later, even Eric Holder’s Justice Department finally admitted that the whole “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” story was bunk.
After the Fukushima nuclear meltdown in Japan four years ago, Bill Nye “the (self-proclaimed) Science Guy” gravely informed CNN viewers, “This is all bad and very scary. … You know, it’s nothing but danger. It’s nothing but very serious, very, very long-term problems.” Wired magazine recently reported that, in the four years since the disaster, more than 96 percent of food, fish and agriculture throughout Fukushima has contained less than one-sixth of the radiation permitted in food imported to Europe.
Lena Dunham, star of HBO’s “Girls,” was forced to retract her autobiographical account of having been raped by a campus conservative named “Barry.”
The alleged rapist of Columbia University’s mattress girl finally released her alluring texts to him, and now we all know she was a desperate, spurned lover, not a rape victim.
Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s much-celebrated Rolling Stone story about a fraternity gang-rape at the University of Virginia turned out to be based on one poor, sad girl seeking attention by creating a fake online boyfriend and fantasizing her own gang-rape.
This is Ann Coulter, though. Surely more reasonable conservatives aren’t taking this view. After all, just because a single story turns out not to be true, common sense says that it doesn’t mean that all such stories aren’t true. It’s one thing for right-wing bomb throwers to feed these absurdities to their audience but surely serious journalists have to be aware that one bad example does not refute an entire thesis.
Think again. Here’s Brit Hume of Fox News, spitting fire on Monday:
Rolling Stone magazine’s overdue apology and retraction for its bogus story about that UVA fraternity rape brings to three the number of nationally exposed whoppers that have made their way into the national bloodstream. First was the claim that a white cop in Ferguson Missouri shot dead a young black man as he stood before him with his hands up. Then Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid refused even to try to defend his outright lie that Mitt Romney had paid no income taxes. And now the Columbia Journalism Review’s indictment of Rolling Stone’s recklessness on the UVA story. Three stories on widely divergent topics with one common thread: they all fit nicely into the favored political narratives of the American left. The claim of an epidemic of sexual assaults on college campuses. The idea of Mitt Romney and other businessmen as “fat cats” who unjustly enrich themselves at the expense of others. And the notion of American police forces as hotbeds of racist violence.
The three stories have collapsed but the larger claims they fed live on. Today at the White House, for example, a question to spokesman Josh Earnest about the UVA case. Was it about those falsely accused? Or the damage to the university or the fraternity? Of course not. It was about whether the exposure of the false story might quote, discourage other victims of sexual assault from coming forward.
The Rolling Stone music, you might say, has stopped. But the beat goes on…
Hume essentially says that there is no problem of rape on campus, no problem with wealthy businessmen using special loopholes to avoid paying taxes and no problem with young black males being unfairly targeted by police forces around the country. These are all just false “notions” that were given currency by lies and hoaxes perpetrated for the purpose of spreading a false narrative — which now exist independently of the false stories that “fed” them.
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