“The actual Lie of the Year was too hot for PolitiFact,” as is often the case when it works against The Narrative. As Don Surber notes, “for three months, Dorian Johnson’s lies fueled riots across the country. The whole Hands Up, Don’t Shoot movement is based on this lie. The news media including Fox News has refused to call his lies what they are: lies:”
Rather than take on the biggest prevarication of 2014 — one that threatened to tear the nation apart along racial lines — the people at PolitiFact went with a vague and lame “exaggerations about Ebola.” A lie is a statement that is knowingly false. Exaggerations stretch the truth. PolitiFact’s confusion over what is a lie is the most embarrassing admission by a new organization that compiles these lists since Time Magazine selected YOU! as its Man of the Year in 2006.
The lie of the year is Dorian Johnson’s statement to Wolf Blitzer about the shooting and death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, last August: “I saw the officer proceeding after my friend Big Mike with his gun drawn, and he fired a second shot and that struck my friend Big Mike. And at that time, he turned around with his hands up, beginning to tell the officer that he was unarmed and to tell him to stop shooting. But at that time, the officer firing several more shots into my friend, and he hit the ground and died.”
That was a lie. The autopsy and testimony from at least a half-dozen witnesses confirm that Dorian Johnson lied through his teeth.
But PolitiFact is too spineless to call that the Lie of the Year because the American press in the 21st century is afraid of being called racist by liberal black organizations.
When it comes to the Orwellianly-named “Politifact,” as the Insta-Professor would say, “Just think of them as Democratic operatives with bylines and you won’t go far wrong.”
Update: “PolitiFact got nearly everything about its ‘Lie of the Year’ wrong,” Commentary’s Seth Mandel writes. Which brings us back to the previous quote from Glenn Reynolds.
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