Washington Post local columnist Petula Dvorak waded into the ginned-up fake news debate in her Tuesday column as she compared the false and unsubstantiated Pizzagate story to the “doctored” and “gotcha” videos that spawned the Planned Parenthood scandal and Sarah Palin causing then-Congresswoman Gabby Giffords to be shot in 2011 (even though the first case was real and the second was thoroughly debunked).
As this writer has mentioned on numerous occasions, the left and their friends in the media have constantly blasted conservatives and Republicans for overreaching when it came to certain issues and Clinton/Obama scandals while little has been discussed when it came to the left doing the same in the month since the presidential election.
Dvorak began her piece with a heavy focus on Pizzagate and the shots being fired at a D.C. neighborhood pizza place that some have falsely come to believe through an old tweet by the late Andrew Breitbart that it was part of a child sex ring:
The fake news stuff we’ve been talking about?
That all just got real.
An entire D.C. neighborhood was on lockdown Sunday because some dope with a gun believed a fake news story that wildly and wrongly linked a neighborhood pizzeria to a child sex ring.
You could conclude that Edgar Maddison Welch, the 28-year-old man from North Carolina who allegedly walked into the Comet Ping Pong restaurant carrying an assault rifle, pointed it at an employee and then fired one or more shots, may be a singular nut job.
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Wondering how people believe stories in The National Enquirer that aren’t even “remotely serious,” Dvorak chose not to look at her own employer or major TV outlets but instead attacked the pro-life group Center for Medical Progress and their undercover Planned Parenthood baby parts videos as being the lynchpin for a Colorado man to shoot up a local Planned Parenthood.
“What happened at Comet Ping Pong isn’t the first time we’ve seen real consequences of the doctored-news phenomenon. A year ago, a “gotcha” video — created by folks who lied, schemed and plotted to get a doctor to talk about the graphic details of her work while secretly being recorded — was pinging in the head of Robert Lewis Dear Jr. when he stormed a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado,” Dvorak complained.
Dvorak continued with spin that somehow these videos weren’t true that couldn’t have been done any better than if Planned Parenthood wrote it themselves:
Grandstanding congressmen fed him the “baby parts” line after they watched that heavily edited video of a Planned Parenthood executive talking about the donation of tissue from aborted fetuses. (They must’ve forgotten that fetal tissue has been used in important medical research since the 1930s and helped produce vaccines for polio, measles and mumps.)
The video was created under false pretenses and never would have met the standards of a legitimate news organization.
That faux investigation ended in hours of congressional hearings, a budget crisis for Planned Parenthood in many states and the deaths of those three people in Colorado.
If one’s blood isn’t boiling at this insanity by a pro-abortion lefty in D.C., she even outdid herself with her other comparison that was even more ludicrous.
Despiet this being a piece slamming fake news, Dvorak embraced the false narrative of how, five years later, Sarah Palin is responsible for what happened to Giffords at an Arizona Safeway in January 2011.
“Five years ago, it wasn’t fake news but an equally careless use of words that helped incite an equally terrible burst of violence. Supporters of former Alaska governor Sarah Palin put out a map with crosshairs targeting the districts of 20 House Democrats and urging folks: ‘Don’t Retreat, Instead — RELOAD,’” she claimed.
Dvorak continued using the crutch that “words matter” and Palin should have been more careful (despite the fact that shooter Jared Lee Loughner was both disturbed and an independent who didn’t vote in 2010):
Then-Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) was on that map and criticized it as soon as it was posted online and her office was vandalized.
“We’re on Sarah Palin’s targeted list, but the thing is that the way she has it depicted has the crosshairs of a gun sight over our district,” Giffords told MSNBC at the time. “When people do that, they’ve got to realize there’s consequences to that action.”
On Jan. 8, 2011, the consequences were chilling: Jared Loughner showed up with a gun outside a Tucson supermarket where Giffords was greeting constituents and killed six people and injured 20 more, including Giffords.
Still, as the funerals were being held and Giffords was in intensive care, Palin’s supporters insisted that crosshairs were never a reference to guns.
Taking everything into consideration, the left has once again shown that any worthwhile push to halt the spread of legitimately fake news can easily be stymied and backfire in an instant whenever liberals seize on the situation to promote it’s own self-serving agenda to attacking conservatives and right-leaning news sites (like this one) that truly do care about accuracy and take our jobs seriously to not spread falsehoods.
