As PJM’s Rick Moran noted Saturday, two hoaxers fooled the media into reporting that they were fired Twitter employees, victims of Elon Musk’s heartless purge of opponents of the freedom of speech. When the hoax was exposed, we all had a hearty laugh at the expense of the media outlets, including CNBC and Bloomberg, that fell for it and reported what the “fired employees” said as if they were real. Even top media outlets themselves joined in the laughter; the New York Post headlined a story “Pranksters posing as laid-off Twitter employees trick media outlets: ‘Rahul Ligma.’” For The Win chortled: “Tech reporters fell for a fake Twitter employee purge story.” But really, this is nothing new, so why is everyone laughing? The media has been hoaxing us for years. Decades, in fact.
Back in September 1958, yes, 1958, Betty Friedan, who later became a feminist heroine, published an article in Harper’s Magazine entitled “The Coming Ice Age.” In April 1975, it was still coming: Newsweek published an article entitled “The Cooling World,” which lamented the general inaction in the face of this alleged crisis in terms that will sound familiar to those who are familiar with our current global warming climate alarmism: “Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects. They concede that some of the more spectacular solutions proposed, such as melting the arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers, might create problems far greater than those they solve.” That’s right: they wanted to melt the Arctic ice cap. Since then, it has become far more fashionable to claim that the Arctic ice cap is already melting because we bought a new Chrysler, and we’re all gonna die in ten years or so as a result.
On June 29, 1989, the Associated Press (AP), which for some reason still remains a respected news organization despite the fact that it is one of the leading Leftist propaganda outfits operating today, published an article stating: “A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.” So technically, the hoaxer was Noel Brown, director of the New York office of the UN Environment Program (UNEP), but AP, and much of the Western world, fell for him as hard as anyone in the assembled media did for the jokesters carrying boxes around in front of Twitter headquarters Thursday. And here it is 2022, and nary a single nation has yet been wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels, but leading politicians are still insisting that this unparalleled catastrophe is still right around the corner unless we all start voting Democrat and saving up for electric cars.
The hoaxes have come thick and fast in recent years. In February 2020, Science magazine reported that “a group of 27 prominent public health scientists from outside China is pushing back against a steady stream of stories and even a scientific paper suggesting a laboratory in Wuhan, China, may be the origin of the outbreak of COVID-19. ‘The rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data on this outbreak is now being threatened by rumours and misinformation around its origins,’ the scientists, from nine countries, write in a statement published online by The Lancet yesterday.”
The statement declared: “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.” Yet in June 2022, the World Health Organization (WHO) accepted the possibility of the lab leak theory that had previously been dismissed as a conspiracy theory. Now Republican Senators have endorsed it.
There are so many more media hoaxes. We were told, on pain of banning from social media and ridicule from our moral superiors, that the 2020 election was the freest, fairest, most transparent in human history, and the media continued to insist this even after Time magazine actually boasted about how the election was “fortified” to ensure a Biden victory. The media still insists that the lovely Rachel Levine is a woman, as are Lia Thomas and Caitlyn Jenner. The media still insists that if you just get a vaccine — or two or three (or four) (or five) (or six) vaccines — you won’t get COVID, or, uh, your COVID will be so much milder than it would have been otherwise.
Hoaxes, in sum, are what the media is all about. What was unusual about the two guys outside Twitter’s headquarters is that media outlets immediately owned up to the hoax. Other hoaxes they keep insisting are true, even as the months, years, and decades go by.
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