Over on Fox Nation, a Fox website for their news arm, they often run headlines that are taken directly from a heavily conservative blog called NewsBusters. If you’re not biased already and do your own checking you’ll see that half the headlines today on Fox Nation are directly taken right from this conservative blog.
What’s worse is that one caught my eye entitled, “Oliver Stone: ‘Reagan Was a Dumb Son of a Bitch… and Bush Was Dumber.‘”
The curious part of this is that, as you can see above, it’s CLEARLY quoting director Oliver Stone saying “Reagan was a dumb son of a bitch.” Can we all agree that this is what this headline is suggesting? Frankly, if you think it means anything else I’d have to question your educational background.
Anyway, this story is about an appearance Oliver Stone made on Bill Maher‘s show Real Time with Bill Maher. The problem with it is that I saw this show. Oliver Stone was talking with Bill about his research for his movie about Richard Nixon and pointed out that Nixon said Ronald Reagan was a dumb son of a bitch. He did agree with that quote but that’s something entirely different than what you see above.
What’s more is that at the time I saw this there were 127 comments on the story and it was clear from looking over every one of them that not one of these people actually saw this show but that didn’t stop them from demonizing Oliver Stone.
I put up a post denoting this mistake and, quite unsurprisingly to me, my post hasn’t been put up. Hmmm….. Even more interesting is that if you actually read the NewsBusters piece the headline is the same but the story points out that Stone is quoting Nixon.
Again, people only hear what they want to hear and when they hear it they have no reason to ever question it or verify it for accuracy. That we have a network that abuses this reality is, frankly, abhorrent to me. It just shouldn’t be.
