No matter what Breitbart or any other silly bloggers say –or non-fact-checking news outlets– no ranches in South Texas have been invaded and taken over by any Mexican gangs crossing the border. I repeat, we have not been “invaded” and there is no outbreak of “war” on the border.
I realize that to people who don’t live in Texas, it may seem like a really HUGE place where something completely out of the norm might happen on the border and people a couple hundred miles away might not hear about it, but just as in other states, most Texans have friends and family all over the state. We just don’t get to see them as often as people who live in tiny little states one can drive across in an hour. If there were gun battles and ranches being taken over near Laredo, I assure you Texans would know about it. The first I heard about it was on Rachel Maddow last night, and before she even declared it yet one more made-up right-wing blogger tall tale, I knew it wasn’t true. Even though I have been out of touch with national news lately, something this big in my own state would have been impossible to avoid hearing about from both my local news and friends and family members.
Of course, this isn’t stopping some right-wing bloggers from continuing to insist it did happen, and now it’s just being covered up. Some of them are even calling for video proof that it didn’t happen. What do they want? News crews to go out and do shots of ranchers ranching? And do they actually think a Texas rancher who had been invaded and lost his ranch to a gang of Mexican thugs during a gun battle could be silenced? Obviously don’t know many Texas ranchers (or Texans). All the ones I know would be in front of every news camera they could scare up yelling at the top of their lungs about it.
Going even further in their attempt to mislead, many of these right-wing blogs and news outlets are linking to video reports about the violence which is actually going on in Mexico (and has been for a very, very long time) with headlines acting as though these stories somehow prove there have been ranches forcibly taken from Texas ranchers by Mexican gangs, and linking to stories about Mexican drug cartels silencing the press IN MEXICO as proof these gangs across the border are silencing American news sources.† I have to guess their target audience is rarely bothered to watch said videos or read said stories, all of which don’t match the headlines or linked text at all when one actually bothers to read/watch them.
I still find myself incapable of determining whether these people are stupid or evil. Are they lying because they want to promote their agenda? Or are they passing on untruths because they are too damn stupid to know better? In the end, I don’t think it matters if they are stupid or evil. Misinformation is misinformation, but at least I can usually find a soft spot in my heart to forgive people for being stupid. Stupidity is fixable with education. Evil, not so much.
Footnotes- † Actually, I wish American news sources could be silenced. It’d be better than 90% of the crap they spew on a daily basis. I’m sort of surprised Fox News hasn’t jumped on this story … or maybe they have, and I just haven’t heard about it yet. Not like I ever watch or read Fox News. I value my brain cells too much to force them to consume such garbage. [↩]
“Are they lying because they want to promote their agenda?’
And who isn’t doing that these days to push their own agenda? It all come down to which team jersey you are wearing; yours or theirs. :bounce:
The American press is given wide latitude in reporting. Editors often invent filler to make stories more compelling, knowing that short of intentional libel, they can always run corrections later, using the excuse that there was confusion at the time. This leniency is abused regularly by those promoting whatever agenda when they have difficulty finding events to corroborate their views. Everyone does it to some extent; this instance is remarkable only because of the extreme use of fear and gullibility.
One frequent deceptive practice, occasionally employed by everyone’s favorite sissyboy, Matt Drudge, is to run a screamer headline linked not to any established news source, but rather to the one hundred eighty-seventh comment some nut left on a blog site you never heard of. Easy enough tactic to grab any story you want. The sad fact is that while people have an innate desire for affirming narrative in their lives, the more desperate will settle for most anything.
Oh, I know everyone is pressing some kind of agenda these days, but I do long for the days when one turned on the news and got, you know, NEWS. The sort of news containing facts that had been checked.
Some of these folks are still clinging to this ridiculous story of ranches being taken over by Zetas, but thankfully, the only actual news sources that gave into it were a few newspapers (as far as I know). What really makes it ridiculous is do the ones still insisting it happened think that if something like that HAD happened that Pretty Hair Perry who is struggling to get reelected and who is bleating non-stop about immigration problems wouldn’t have had the Texas Rangers and National Guard down there in an instant while he stood in front of cameras pointing and frothing at the mouth about it? Perry would LOVE for something like this to happen.
run a screamer headline linked not to any established news source, but rather to the one hundred eighty-seventh comment some nut left on a blog site you never heard of
Or just running a screamer headline and linking it to a story that says the exact opposite of what his headline says … like the one he had up about Mexican gangs suppressing the media. Totally implied they were suppressing American media (on the ranch story), but of course, no such thing was mentioned in the story about them controlling Mexican media (which I don’t doubt they do – they control a lot of things in Mexico right now).