Michelle Malkin And The Anatomy Of The 2 Million Protester Lie

Michelle Malkin And The Anatomy Of The 2 Million Protester Lie
This post was published on the now-closed HuffPost Contributor platform. Contributors control their own work and posted freely to our site. If you need to flag this entry as abusive, send us an email.

Blame it on a tweet.

It turns out that's what kicked off the right-wing blogosphere's comically inept misinformation campaign last weekend to try to swell the size of Saturday's anti-Obama protest in the nation's capital, to jack the crowd size up to the wildly inflated -- and erroneous -- number of 2 million people.

For most sane observers, what transpired over the weekend resembled a comical bout of telephone tag -- the game schoolchildren play when they whisper something into a friend's ear and then get a big laugh when, six or seven friends later, they hear how distorted the original message has become via garbled repetition. (Two million protesters!) The sad part is that right-wing bloggers are serious. They think they're engaging in some bold new era of citizen journalism. Instead, they just, you know, make stuff up.

It's just the latest example in a string of unforgettable whoppers from online conservatives who rarely let the facts get in the way of a good story. And, yes, irony abounds in that right-wing bloggers hate the press and that they hate the practice of journalism. They lecture reporters about accountability and fairness all the time, yet whenever amateur conservatives try their hand at reporting, they just produce guffaws for the rest of us. (Did I mention they miscalculated the size of the crowd by 1,930,000 people?)

On Saturday, facts didn't matter because right-wing ringleader Malkin was helping to spread a sprawling (and illogical) lie, and her dutiful followers knew just what to do: spread it hard and fast. Perhaps Malkin's only regret was she didn't aim higher; she could have claimed there were news reports of 12 million people protesting in D.C., and I'm sure every one of her willingly gullible devotees would have linked to her.

They really are shameless. And they really do inhabit their own parallel political universe where everyone's allergic to facts.

Read the entire Media Matters column here.

Popular in the Community

Close

What's Hot