Daily Caller’s Matt Lewis Publishes Easily Debunkable Lies, And ABC’s Tapper and LA Times Pick Them Up
This guy gets a regular gig on MSNBC too. What does it take to have no credibility over at GE-owned MSNBC? “A lie goes around the world while truth is still putting its boots on.” The Daily Caller is Tucker Carlson’s little vanity blog, ostensibly created to be the “HuffPo” of the right in typical grandiose Carlson fashion. When AOL’s Politics Daily writer Matt Lewis heard about the AOL/HuffPo deal, he bolted for Daily Caller, perhaps afraid he might actually have to do a lifestyle or celebrity fluff piece or worse, some actual fact-checking *gasp!*. See, because Tucker doesn’t need no stinkin’ fact-checking when it comes to his rather pedestrian outlet. Which makes it a perfect fit for Matt Lewis, who only has a glancing relationship with reality, as the video above illustrates. But what do you say about the allegedly credible outlets that just blithely repeat Lewis’ lies ? Yesterday afternoon Matt Lewis printed completely without any verification that the Facebook page of a right-wing group shut down the comments section of President Obama’s Facebook chat this afternoon because conservatives were so energized that they clicked through the link and went to the Facebook page for the Whitehouse townhall driving so much traffic and comments that Facebook’s page went offline. It seems far-fetched right? A Facebook group ( called ForAmerica ) produces enough traffic to take down another Facebook page (Obama’s national townhall) by itself while the first Facebook page is still up and running and directing traffic to second page. The problem isn’t that the Daily Caller or Matt Lewis should have any credibility discussing the power of a conservative group or new media, but that Lewis’ story on the Daily Caller was picked up by other reporters, most notably Jake Tapper at ABC News . Kombiz goes through the mathematical improbability of the Facebook townhall being taken down and shows how easily debunkable the whole premise is. So, you can’t take down Facebook. Even if you tried to instigate a very illegal Denial-of-service attack against Facebook, you can’t take down Facebook. It’s partly why you never see hackers or Anonymous try to take down Amazon, Google and Facebook. Their infrastructure is too large and redundant to take offline. These numbers are easily verifiable either by talking to Facebook, doing research on Google or talking to anyone who works in the online space. The problem here isn’t that Matt Lewis lies, — he comes from Townhall and Human Events, we know he’s a right-wing activist not a real reporter. The problem is that he has enough credibility in Washington, DC for Jake Tapper and Mike Memoli from the LA Times to take him seriously.
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on April 22, 2011. Filed under