After the horrific past week which saw a video of graphic police brutality, the country set ablaze during riots in every major city, just on the heels of record pandemic unemployment, you can’t fault anyone for craving a little good news.
Fortunately that was delivered today in the form of surprisingly low unemployment numbers – with the economy adding 2.5 million jobs as it reopens instead of losing an additional 8 million jobs, pushing the unemployment rate to Great Depression territory.
President Trump held an end of week press conference to sign bipartisan legislation to increase the number of loans for coronavirus-hit small businesses, and delivered some impromptu remarks beforehand.
Usually these things are fun to watch live because he riffs constantly and treats them as placeholders for typical press conferences.
Trump covered a lot of ground, from vaccine efforts to joking he’d buy an RV.
Additionally, Trump gave some remarks after the George Floyd memorial service, talking about the need for “equal justice under the law”.
Here is a video of those remarks:
And here are those remarks in text:
“Equal justice under the law must mean that every American receives equal treatment in every encounter with law enforcement regardless of race, color, gender, or creed. They have to receive fair treatment from law enforcement. They have to receive it. We all saw what happened last week. We can’t let that happen. Hopefully George is looking down right now and saying, ‘This is a great thing that’s happening for our country.’ It’s a great day for him. It’s a great day for everybody. This is a great day for everybody. This is a great day in terms of equality. It’s really what our Constitution requires and it’s what our country is all about.“
Somehow, the entirely uncontroversial above statement was completely blown out of context by many members of the media, who ran with a vile meme that Trump said George Floyd would be…happy about better jobs numbers.
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo is particularly shameless, and was immediately corrected by Vaughn Sterling of CNN.
Later, Josh started spinning like a top.
Gabby Orr (Politico White House reporter) made a quick delete.
But not fast enough! There was still time for Matt Miller of Bleacher Report to get a hot take.
Cable news is no stranger to the hot take, and Andrea Mitchell got former RNC Chairman Michael Steele to give one too.
More bluecheck (“verified” on Twitter) journalists took the bait too, including Eamon Javers, a CNBC reporter:
Erik Wasson, a Bloomberg News reporter:
And another twofer, Shona Murray of Euronews and Adam Cancryn of Politico:
Of course, “up to the minute” media outlets started picking up on the fake meme too, including Business Insider:
NY Daily News:
and the Daily Mail.
Even major media outlets like ABC News weren’t immune to securing a juicy headline:
Joe Lockhart, a CNN political analyst, mused about the Republican response:
And Sara Cook, the White House producer for CBS News, produced a falsehood:
All of the above have been screenshotted, not embedded, so no one can delete later (like Gabby Orr did) and pretend like it didn’t happen.
Psychology theorizes about a confirmation bias, where people start to “actively seek out and assign more weight to evidence that confirms their hypothesis, and ignore or underweigh evidence that could disconfirm their hypothesis”.
There’s also the unconscious bias, where subtle stereotypes come into play.
Media, which is designed to be, well, objective, almost seems to have a pre-recorded response to Trump statements: assume the worst, most offensive thing, and that’s exactly what he said.
So it’s no wonder the reactions to Trump’s genial, agreeable statement eulogizing George Floyd were so twisted – the reaction was automatic before people even saw the full clip. The assumption?
Trump talks about job numbers today > Trump talks about George Floyd being happy today > Trump says George Floyd would be happy about the jobs numbers today.
It’s not like it was hard to get right either:
The meme, not the truth, is off to the races, which is why it’s so crucial to watch these things live. Otherwise, you just might take the bait.
End of day update: apparently Washington Post (“Democracy dies in darkness”) took the bait hook, line, and sinker, and once they got done pulling the rod out of their mouth had to issue a rare retraction:
“A previous version of this story incorrectly said that the president called the jobs report a ‘great day’ for George Floyd, the black man killed by white police in Minneapolis. In fact, the president was referring to growing calls for equal justice under the law.”
And to think – if they’d just watched the speech live and done their job – none of this would’ve been necessary.
