When it comes to false media narratives, the typical right-winger should be more concerned with the plank in his own eye than with the speck in the eye of a liberal. That, minus the allusion to the Sermon on the Mount, was the essential argument from Salon writer Heather Digby Parton in a Wednesday column.
Parton sees Rolling Stone’s debunked, retracted University of Virginia rape story as one component of the right’s “new meme about liberal lies and false narratives.” This meme, she suggested, is wildly overblown (for example, even though “hands up, don’t shoot” was discredited, “young black males being unfairly targeted by police” still is a major problem) as well as hypocritical (e.g., Fox News has “peddle[d] false narratives” about matters such as the Benghazi attack and made a ton of money doing so).
From Parton’s piece (bolding added):
[Conservatives’] jubilation over the Rolling Stone debacle is about…the [idea] 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…Ann Coulter…
…Eric Holder’s Justice Department finally admitted that the whole “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” story was bunk…
Lena Dunham, star of HBO’s “Girls,” was forced to retract her autobiographical account of having been raped by a campus conservative named “Barry”…
… Here’s Brit Hume of Fox News…
First was [“hands up, don’t shoot”]. 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…Rolling Stone’s recklessness…Three stories…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…
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...
This is, of course, nonsense…If a narrative has formed around these issues it’s because of a preponderance of such stories over time and the data that backs them up…
Brett Baier: There are false stories, wrong stories on the right as well …
Hume: Sure there are. But can you imagine if [Fox News] had [aired] an entirely false account of an event that never happened? No one associated with that account would still be working here…It’s different on the left.
…[T]he idea that Fox News isn’t guilty of promoting “narratives” based on false stories without repercussions is more than a little hilarious…Fox may not be the only news organization to peddle false narratives, but it is surely the one to make the greatest profits from doing it.
…[W]hen [Benghazi investigations] turned up no evidence of any of the charges Republicans and Fox News pundits had thrown out, Fox did not retract their stories or fire anyone who forwarded them on-air…
Hume undoubtedly believes that Fox is a lone truth-teller in a sea of lying liberal media hoaxers who are marginalizing them at every turn. This is the “narrative” that right-wingers tell themselves about everything.
