Twitter continues to reward saying what's POPULAR, not what's TRUE
Twitter continues to reward saying what's POPULAR, not what's TRUE
A self-described "CNN journalist" attributed a fake quote to Aaron Rodgers that went viral and used to the "it's only parody" defense as the reason for lying because there are no repercussions anymore
One of my favorite moments in Edward R. Murrow’s career happened in 1952, when he reported that Joseph McCarthy said, “I don’t care if you’re actually a communist or not, if you are my enemy then I will frame you.”
Murrow then went on the air the next night and said, in a Fred Armisen voice, “I’m just kidding!”
Maybe even better than that was on November 22, 1963, when Walter Conkite was reporting on the JFK assassination and he informed the American people that the head of the C.I.A. sent out a memo saying, “We had nothing to do with this. I’m not even being a little sarcastic. Okay, maybe I’m being a little sarcastic. A lot sarcastic. Oh I’m soooooo sarcastic.”
Cronkite nearly quit CBS on November 23rd because of the public backlash that happened when Americans were furious to find out that C.I.A. director John McCone never actually sent any memo. Instead he went on the air and mocked America for being “too stupid to get satire.”
Or maybe these moments didn’t happen. Hey, I’m no historian! What does it matter if I’m making these moments up given the fact that… “I’M JUS’ KIDDING!”
However, Murrow and Cronkite never had to adapt to a world in which Twitter existed, so who knows what could have happened if they were subject to the same “Laws of Truth” that we must abide by in a world where America’s biggest jokesters and the country’s “journalists” must occupy the same exact space and compete for the same love, adoration, and praise from the millions of potential followers on social media.
To what degree could Murrow and Cronkite have been corrupted during the fight between saying what’s truthful and saying something that has the potential to go viral?
On Friday, a person who nobody in the NFL world had ever heard of named David M. Perry tweeted that Aaron Rodgers told ESPN that he was “being silenced” by the media. The mere fact that an Aaron Rodgers quote tweeted by a “historian” and “pub musician” went viral should have been evidence enough that the message lacked truth.
Why in the world would a quote by Aaron Rodgers go viral — over 5,000 total retweets and 35,000 favorites — for Perry instead of the news being delivered in a tweet by Mina Kimes, Adam Schefter, or Field Yates? Well, obviously because Rodgers never said it, so Perry was sure to eliminate all competition by evaporating the truth.
Satire isn’t lost on me and neither is Perry’s joke here. I’m not going to be that person who claims that David Perry sat down and had the thought, “I’m going to lie for attention today” because then I’d be betraying a more realistic possibility, which is that Perry feels genuine disdain for Rodgers (as many people do, whether that came before or after “Joe Rogan” is meaningless as this has nothing to do with vaccines) and he was so upset that Rodgers was getting even more media attention that he felt it necessary to criticize him.
People have criticized athletes since the beginning of athletes, but with Rodgers looking like a favorite to win his second straight MVP award the “hit him where it hurts: he sucks” angle was not going to be the angle. Thankfully for those who do disdain, a whole litany of reasons to dislike Rodgers has been constructed over the years and the list has only grown as Rodgers does more interview appearances.
One of those reasons being that Aaron Rodgers once told Pat McAfee that the “woke mob” was trying to “cancel” him. Perry then took that moment, which is now over two months old, and tied it into an ESPN article that Kevin Van Valkenburg posted on Friday because Rodgers spent a good deal of time in the interview attempting to clear up all the misinformation that was spread during and after that McAfee appearance.
Rodgers literally says in the interview that his main issue isn’t what people think of him but that people spread misinformation about what he says, and Perry’s response was to tweet a lie about something Rodgers said in the interview.
"And I still do enjoy a separation of private life and [professional] life, but there were far too many people who were trying to write the narrative of my life and writing things or speaking for me that perpetuated this idea about who I was or what I felt or what the truth was that was just patently false. So, it wasn't so much about caring what people said about me, it was wanting to halt narratives about me that are just, at their core, not true."
Irony—it’s not just a way to describe what’s in your blood anymore!
Now, one could ask to what degree someone who is only an NFL fan should be held accountable for tweeting the truth about an NFL player. David Perry has nothing to do with sports at all, he’s just a self-described Bills fan who happened to tweet something about Rodgers and it ended up reaching the top of Reddit because IF IT HAD BEEN TRUE it would have been newsworthy to some degree; I imagine that Kimes, Schefter, Yates and all the usual suspects did some digging, re-reading after the Perry tweet came across the timeline. Anyone worth their credentials wouldn’t touch that tweet with a 10-foot selfie stick without verifying its validity but 99.99% of the internet has no credentials to worry about.
So it spreads like a…
The question is whether or not Perry has any credentials to worry about.
On his website, Perry describes himself as such:
Welcome to the website of journalist, historian, and speaker David M. Perry. David writes informed commentary and reported features for outlets like CNN, The Nation, and the Washington Post. He has a PhD in history from the University of Minnesota and is currently co-writing The Bright Ages (Harper Collins), a new single-volume history of the Middle Ages.
If Perry’s first descriptor of his job title is “journalist” over “historian” then surely he must take integrity seriously. After all, how could anyone possibly be taken as seriously as is necessary while writing “How Historically Accurate Is Matt Damon’s Hideous Mullet in The Last Duel?” or “How Elvis Presley can help us with a Covid vaccine” unless you have kept your integrity intact?
And if David Perry somehow comes across this post and is reading this very sentence, let me preempt a response by saying that I understand where you are coming from and I don’t believe you ever intended your Aaron Rodgers tweet to be taken seriously enough to go viral. On Thursday, Aaron Rodgers did a phone interview with ESPN and nobody had ever linked Perry to the NFL, and less than 24 hours later it is quite probable that even the Packers quarterback himself had become aware of Perry. How weird that must have been for you!
But the problem has much less to do with the original tweet than it does with how Perry reacted to the fact that people were upset that the quote was made up.
I understand that the ego is a powerful beast that lives inside each and everyone of us, dormant or not. However, Perry misled thousands of people and whether that was intentional or unintentional, the consequences of spreading misinformation is that most people will never follow up for the truth. The original reddit post has over 6,000 upvotes and was the most popular of the day; the reddit post on Perry’s follow-up admitting that he was only trying to “mock” Rodgers has barely more than 2,000 and won’t be checked on by everyone who read the original post.
From 5,000 retweets on the lie to… 42 retweets on the admission of it being a lie… or “parody” as Perry claims.
Instead of feeling humbled by the moment that he accidentally went viral by tweeting out a fake quote, Perry promoted his book* and blamed Rodgers for the entire pandemic.
*the “while you’re here, buy my thing or subscribe to my patreon” never, ever, ever leads to a purchase or a subscription by the way, but keep shooting huckleberry
The biggest issue of all here is that a blue checkmark with 60,000 followers who calls himself a “journalist” tweeted out a lie and it became the most popular thing he’s ever done, so what lesson is David Perry going to learn from the last 48 hours? He went viral (which again, leads to nothing but twitter users still buy into the false premise that these moments are beneficial to them when in reality it’s just a short-term chemical reward) with the “satire” but his more genuine thoughts on Rodgers get 0-4 retweets.
Instead of Perry becoming very worried that his integrity as a journalist was called into question and reflecting on how to repair or assuage those concerns, he turned to “the world sucks, not me” and “gunna mute the haters and cook bro” and didn’t spend a character to say… “Didn’t mean to mislead anyone, just a joke that got way too real.”
I don’t tend to side with the “you should apologize” crowd very often but the unintended consequences to his tweet should no less make him think twice about whether or not he’s being taken seriously and if his word is ever going to be taken at face value again. I know that Twitter houses trillions of jokes (most of which are the same boring joke) and that can get lost on people as so many journalists find themselves in a position to also be “comedians” now, but just because that’s what works for some people doesn’t mean it’s going to work for you.
Just because the reporters must share space with the pranksters, it doesn’t mean that the news has to also t.p. the principal’s house once in a while. The next time you tweet out a quote from someone, one that’s actually true, how many of your followers will even believe it? What’s the set of mental steps they must now go through every time you “report” something on Twitter? At least one of those steps being, “Oh wait, this is the Rodgers lie guy? Hmmm. I better think twice about this again.”
Thinking twice before you tweet is always good advice. I mean, are you even a Bills fan?