It was an eyebrow-raising headline even for Facebook, which has no shortage of them.
“NAACP Officially Endorses Trump for 2020 Election,” it read. The person who shared it had copied and pasted part of the story into the body of the post, a rambling quote attributed to an NAACP spokesperson. It talked about members being fooled into believing that “Trump will put you in chains,′ but eventually realizing the president “is a true friend of the black community.”
Having read just days before an official press release from the NAACP that applauded Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s decision to proceed with articles of impeachment against Trump, I smelled something fishy.
It didn’t take long to find out what. All I had to do was click on the link.
The story is the product of a website that offers “satire for Flat Earthers, Trumpsters and Y’all Qaeda” and is stored in a folder labeled “Conservative Fan Fiction.” The NAACP mentioned in the story is the Norman Association for the Advancement of Coloring People, and the president is identified as one Donald Juniper Trump.
A few observations:
For one, I mourn the state of satire, a noble literary genre that has fallen on hard times from the heights of practitioners like Jonathan Swift and his “Modest Proposal,” or even Mad magazine, for heaven’s sake.
I’m not even certain what was being satirized here. The supposed naivete of some minorities who believe Trump actually cares about them? The NAACP for speaking out against Trump? The GOP for standing by their man in a way that puts Loretta Lynn to shame? Democrats for seeking impeachment so close to an election year?
I don’t know, and I’m not sure the author does either. The piece commits a cardinal sin of satire because it does not enlighten readers in any way, does not hold any one person or group up to ridicule, and isn’t funny.
I suspect “satire” is a cover the website uses in an attempt to legitimize what is nothing more than a propaganda machine. Readers aren’t meant to go beyond the headline, but rather just forward it, like some maniacal chain letter on steroids.
So a bigger concern is how a piece like this can quickly be weaponized by people who don’t read carefully or who support a cause at the expense of objective truth.
This is a problem across all social media, but nowhere more than on Facebook, where the policy regarding political ads is to have no policy, to let content flow freely to 2 billion worldwide users (although the site may begin flagging political content as not fact-checked, which is at least a start).
At no time in history has it been more important for readers to be discerning consumers of information than in an era when every basement-dwelling, chain-smoking conspiracy theorist has access to worldwide publishing at the touch of a button — and when more than a few of these people have started companies with no goal other than to obfuscate the truth and stump on behalf of a particular person or cause, no matter how spurious or injurious to the nation.
Despite all President Trump’s grousing about supposedly left-leaning news organizations, the truth is that any bias demonstrated by these media giants is minuscule compared to the slant offered by far-right-leaning — and, to be fair, fair-left-leaning — organizations that spin more stories than a washing machine spins clothes.
(Of course, if there is an actual hell, then a special circle is reserved for Fox News, where an uber-pernicious slant coupled with a huge budget and a sheen of respectability has done more to divide this country than any other single entity, Trump included.)
To the credit of my Facebook friend, he removed the faux-NAACP post shortly after I alerted him to its questionable nature. But that was only after it had been shared by several other Facebook users.
An old saying in the news industry is that the correction never catches up to the mistake. It’s never been more true, especially in situations where the mistake is intentional and malicious.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
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