Lying Media - Business Insider Edition

I'm usually not inclined to do simple "look at this idiocy" posts - if a lesson can't be learned, a principle displayed, it's usually pointless. That said, this deserves some analysis, if nothing else, as an example of pure-grade bullshit.

Why?

It's an article that basically undermines its own headline and premise within itself.

I, teeth gritted, at least have to give Business Insider props for reporting the facts - before completely ignoring them.

An inaccurate report on the conspiratorial website InfoWars led more than 100,000 individuals this week to sign an online petition calling for Comedy Central to fire a comedian who tweeted a tasteless joke about Barron Trump, President Donald Trump's 10-year-old son.

Well. That's a problem, isn't it? So how was it inaccurate?

The problem? The New York City-based comedian doesn't and has never worked for Comedy Central.

..... 

The controversy started on Monday when InfoWars writer Paul Joseph Watson, a prominent conspiracy theorist, wrongly identified Spinola as a Comedy Central writer in a story about the comedian's tweet.

 Hmmm... So Paul Joseph Watson just made shit up? Skipping forward a bit:

Spinola told Business Insider he suspected that after "Saturday Night Live" writer Katie Rich was suspended for a tweet on Trump's youngest child that conservatives went searching for jokes other comedians had made. At the time, his bio said he was a "Comedy Central content contributor" because the channel had featured some of his work on a show.

Ok - so a guy claims in his bio he's a "content contributor" and it's PJW's fault for not reading his mind and realizing it was self-aggrandizing bullshit to make his work look more important than it seemed? And BI, of course, just glosses over that point, that the person misrepresented himself, is at best a liar, and more likely worse, a bullshitter.

Again, the only reason anyone thinks this idiot works for Comedy Central is because the idiot - in a legally deniable way - claims he did. 

So what was this "joke"? Given the current level of honesty on this idiots bio, and at BI, I expect more bullshit about how it wasn't a big deal.

In the now-deleted tweet, Spinola joked that Trump's 10-year-old son "looks like a very handsome date-rapist-to-be." In a follow-up post, he doubled down.

SJW laws one and two - and a truly horrible joke. Given we have entire, long-running TV series based on how awful men are due to rape culture, and they should be locked up, what kind of same person in their right mi...

Nevermind.

If I understand the article, the problem here isn't that a comedian filled his bio with bullshit to make his work seem more important, or that he made a horribly tasteless and vile joke, or that he doubled down on it. It's that PJW didn't verify whether the guys own self-claimed bio meant he'd sold some work to them or worked for them regularly.

But Spinola has never worked for the channel in any official capacity. He has since deleted the tweets, acknowledging it was insensitive to joke about Trump's child. 

"I knew the tweets were wrong," he told Business Insider. "They are just dumb. They weren't something I would say onstage or something I stand by."

... 

"As a comedian, I make a lot of jokes that are not great," he later added. "A lot of comedians make a lot of jokes that are not great. I made a mistake by attacking a 10-year-old boy."

Insensitive?

Before his last decade of life, when he let his bitterness overcome him, and he still took potshots at leftist idiocy - the Earth wanting plastic for itself and his evisceration of feminists being classics along with the language used at airlines - Carlin had a very serious sketch about how we distance ourselves from the emotional impact of words through euphemisms, and traced the evolution of the term "shellshock" into PTSD.

BI manages to gloss over that even the bullshitting comedian said the jokes were wrong. Even if the comedian then tries to minimize it later in the article.

If you can stomach reading the whole thing, it then goes into how he's getting angry messages, supposed death threats, and so forth. While I'm sure he's getting angry messages, I'm also sure the degree to which there are actual threats, etc. are over exaggerated. But it's milked for the fake news and victimhood angle. And he shows that his apology was pro-forma - he still doesn't realize how vile his statement was, if he thinks the anger directed at him is so awful.

But Spinola did say he found it odd that people were defending Barron Trump by "doing things 1,000 times worse." 

"Shows how dangerous fake news can actually be," he said.