CHILDHOOD’S END: Don’t blame the ditto-heads!

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 11, 2012

Part 3—Learning to blame the purveyors: Are we liberals creating our own ditto-heads as we develop our “liberal” “news” organs?

If so, you can’t exactly blame us rubes for believing a lot fake, phony facts—for becoming ditto-heads of the left. If you’ve been watching MSNBC in the past month, you’ve encountered a blizzard of fake, phony facts, served by the intellectual leaders you probably think you can trust.

On the right, this has been the norm for decades as people have swallowed oceans of guff from the likes of Rush and Sean. Now, the piles of guff are being shoveled at us.

Consider one more example from the coverage of the killing of Trayvon Martin.

On March 27, Big Ed Schultz was helping us stoke our fury. Here's the way he opened his show. We’ll highlight one point:

SCHULTZ (3/27/12): Good to have you with us tonight, folks. Thanks for watching.

Well, the lead investigator in the Trayvon Martin shooting wanted to charge George Zimmerman with manslaughter but the higher-ups told him not to press charges. This is the biggest piece of information to come out of this case since the day Trayvon Martin was killed. This latest report comes from ABC News, according to multiple sources.

Investigator Chris Serino was instructed not to press charges because the state’s attorney office headed by Norm Wolfinger determined there wasn’t enough evidence to lead to a conviction.

Serino filed an affidavit on February 26th, the night Martin was shot and killed by Zimmerman that stated that he was unconvinced by Zimmerman’s version of events.

Now let’s grasp that for just a moment. The lead homicide investigator was questioning the shooter’s story. He didn’t buy it. He recommended a manslaughter charge. But the state attorney who has since been removed from the case told the investigator, “Back off.”

Want to know why there’s outrage? George Zimmerman was not charged and Trayvon’s body sat in a morgue for three days before his parents were contacted. Don’t you think somebody needs to explain that?

If you’re still wondering why there’s so much outrage surrounding this case, these latest reports really ought to clear that up for you, folks.

Big Ed was all fired up, as always. As always, Big Eddie was wrong.

Did Serino file that affidavit? If so, this contradicted waves of propaganda we liberals had been fed on MSNBC concerning the attitude of the police officers who arrived at the scene on the night Martin was killed.

Big Eddie didn’t help us see that these earlier claims and insinuations had been wrong. Instead, he fed us a new misstatement, helping us keep our tribal fury stoked.

Question: Is it true? Did Trayvon Martin’s body “sit in a morgue for three days before his parents were contacted?” That’s what Big Eddie told us this night—and he told us we should be outraged.

Unfortunately, this latest claim was false, like so many other claims he has made. Because we had seen so many people seeming to pimp this claim on The One Liberal Channel, we were surprised when we read the 5000-word news report in the New York Times on April 2.

Dan Barry was the lead reporter. He described the process by which Trayvon Martin’s father learned of his son’s death:

BARRY (4/2/12): Early next morning [after the shooting], no sign of Trayvon, still. Mr. Martin called his son's cellphone, which again went to voice mail. He then repeatedly called the cousin until he answered, only to share the distressing news that he had not seen Trayvon.

Now it was Mr. Martin calling 911. He reported that his son was missing, and then described what his son was wearing. Soon he was outside, meeting a couple of responding police officers. One of them took out a photograph of a dead body from a folder.

''Next thing I heard was a scream,'' Ms. Green said. ''I never want to see anybody in that kind of pain again.''

Mr. Martin cried and cried. At the police station later that day, he said, detectives told him that they had not arrested the man who had shot and killed his son. They explained that George Zimmerman was claiming self-defense.

In fact, Martin’s father learned of his son’s death the morning after the shooting. Trayvon’s body did not “sit in a morgue for three days before his parents were contacted,” the bogus fact Big Eddie had pimped, telling us we should be outraged.

But so what? Big Ed, a ghoul, has been stuffing his pockets with the thrill of such outrage, outrage he has repeatedly stoked with his store of bogus facts. Nor was he the only person pushing this fake fact around.

Did Big Eddie really believe that Trayvon’s body sat in a morgue for three days before his parents were contacted? We don’t know, but if he did, he may have been misled by something he heard on Lawrence O’Donnell’s horrible program. Eight days earlier, radio talker Mark Thompson had angrily offered this:

THOMPSON (3/21/12): Those who killed Emmitt Till left him missing for three days. [Sanford police chief] Bill Lee kept Trayvon missing from his family for three days. Not only did he say that, he also said, if you recall, I’m looked at unfairly—I’m paraphrasing—because I’m a white man in uniform, as if to invoke some type of sympathy or empathy for his situation.

Carefully parsed, that isn’t the same thing Big Ed later said; Thompson’s statement can perhaps be defended as technically accurate. But as various hustlers were crafting such statements, other folk were being misled—and they were feeling upset. Example: Two days later, columnist Annette John-Hall offered this remarkable portrait in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

JOHN-HALL (3/23/12): As a mother, I'm upset about a lot more than that.

How about the fact that authorities bagged Martin's body and tagged it as a John Doe. Even though they had his cellphone and could easily have reached his father, who called it repeatedly when his son didn't come home.

It was three days before Martin's parents were notified of the death of their son—the teen who loved football, his little brother, talking to his girlfriend, and who clearly had parents who loved him unconditionally.

Discarded as a worthless stray.

Just a guess: John-Hall had heard a set of carefully phrased statements, like the statement made by Thompson—and she had been misled. She thought she heard these people saying that Martin’s parents weren’t notified for three days—and she transmitted this bogus fact, saying it had her upset.

Her bogus fact led her to say that the Sanford police “discarded” Martin like “a worthless stray.” On line, no correction has been added to her work.

Four days later, Big Eddie repeated this same inaccurate factual claim, telling us we should be outraged. One night later, Jesse Jackson repeated that factual claim to Schultz—or he may have seemed to. (Jackson: “Since they know who Trayvon Martin was, why John Doe? And why keep him in the morgue for three days away from his family?”)

In fact, Martin’s father learned of his son’s death the morning after he was killed. What had led John-Hall and Schultz to state this inaccurate fact?

Here’s the basic background:

The morning after Big Eddie’s show, the Orlando Sentinel published one of its efforts to stop public figures like Schultz from making so many misstatements. In her very first point, reporter Rene Stutzman addressed the claim which lay behind Schultz’s misstatement:

STUTZMAN (3/28/12): The Trayvon Martin case has generated thousands of news stories and scores of speeches and public proclamations. Sometimes the facts get confused. Here are a few examples:

The Volusia County Medical Examiner's Office refused to release Trayvon's body to his family for three days, an unusually long wait.

Not true, according to the Medical Examiner's Office. It picked up the body at the scene just after 10 p.m. Feb. 26 and notified a Fort Lauderdale funeral home 39 hours later that the body was ready. The funeral home, Roy Mizell and Kurtz, did not pick up the body for an additional 24 hours, the medical examiner reported.

Oops. Judged by this rendering, Schultz had even misstated the claim. According to Stutzman, the claim was that the examiner’s office refused to release Martin’s body for three days—not that Martin’s parents hadn’t been notified of the death. According to Stutzman’s reporting, even this claim was false. But Schultz had made a more heinous claim, a claim which was plainly false.

As he made his bogus claim, Schultz told us liberals that we should be outraged. We tend to agree, though we’d suggest that serious progressives should be outraged by the conduct of people like Schultz.

This is only one of many fake facts which have been pimped by the hustlers, harlequins and hoors found on The One True Liberal Channel. (We’ve been detailing such bogus facts for weeks.) This conduct is highly reminiscent of the long-standing conduct of hustlers on Fox—and of the long-standing conduct of Rush Limbaugh, who helped invent the modern culture of fact-averse tribal pimping.

For decades, we liberals laughed as Limbaugh’s “ditto-heads” recited the bogus claims he spewed. Now, the hustlers are found on our “liberal” channel, and we have our ditto-heads too!

A childish dream has come to an end as we see our own liberal world working this way. Absurd gullibility isn’t just for the other tribe's rubes any more!

Go ahead! Just visit any comment thread and you will see the new generation of ditto-heads—ditto-heads pushing bogus facts they’ve heard from the likes of Ed Schultz. Stutzman has fact-checked various points in the Sentinel—but fact-checking seems to play little role in the work that is now being done on The One True Liberal Channel.

As they stoke our fury and our rage, they move from one fake fact to the next. Sometimes they drop a discredited claim—but have you ever seen one of these horrible people go back and admit to their liberal viewers that they were actually wrong on a factual claim?

Tomorrow, we’ll look at another fake fact Our Own Ditto-heads have been pushing this week. But let’s repeat what we said at the start: It’s understandable, if undesirable, when we see so many gullible liberals repeating so many bogus facts.

As with Rush, so now with Big Ed: Gullible liberals turn to his show, thinking he’s dealing with them in good faith. Sorry! Big Ed Schultz has been pimping fake facts as he stuffs lots of dough in his pockets.

Tomorrow: Three words you can’t say on TV

Where it began: Where did this bogus claim begin? MSNBC began its coverage of the Martin case on Monday evening, March 19. On that night, the New York Times’ Charles Blow served this confusing stew to Schultz:

BLOW (3/19/12): But what has really troubled me and the questions that really arise from this case are how the investigation may or may not have been unfolded with respect to this family. For instance, the fact that the father—

By all accounts, the child left the house with his cell phone, we don’t know if he had a wallet, we don’t know if he had it with him. But he had his cell phone on him.

After he was killed, according to the attorney, he was taken to the medical examiner’s office and he was held there for three days. Now, I don’t know if that includes the day he was shot or not. But the family attorney says three days.

The child has a cell phone on him. So, the father is calling the cell phone to see where his son is. He calls missing persons as well after he doesn’t get called.

I’m trying to figure out, are you telling me that the police did not answer that phone when the father is calling that phone?

The bogus fact may have started here. From that jumbled narration, aothers may have gotten the impression that Martin’s father was calling his son’s phone for three days while the callous, uncaring police refused to answer.

The facts were wrong—but the fury felt good. Where have we seen this before?