Saturday, March 19, 2011

In reply: Tribalism, and believing "they're" worse than "we" are

In reply to: How Political Lies Spread On The Left, which discusses how a number of liberal sites all quoted the same source, and thus "lied" about a bill in Minnesota.
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It's one thing to say these bloggers didn't do their homework on this story, but quite another to accuse them of lying. It is true that they all seem to cite that same source, this "FightBack!News" site--directly or indirectly--and that none of them bothered to check whether what that source said was true. That's the kind of echo chamber familiar to anyone who reads blogs, be they left, right, or otherwise. But to lie, these left leaning bloggers would have to know ahead of time that that source was itself was lying, and Lee offers no evidence that they did.

Now, I would expect them to admit they made an error and to correct it--and I might even call those who refused to do so liars, once I'm satisfied that they know their version of events is untrue--but I wouldn't be so quick to label them as quickly as the author here chose to do.
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Submitted for moderator approval Posted March 19, 2011 at 11:19 am, LS blog time

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