From Mollie Hemingway at The Federalist. On July 4, CNN Politics tweeted this:
Let the people know the facts, and the country will be safe. — Abraham Lincoln
As if it endorses CNN’s fake approach to the news. Problem: The quote is fake. It’s not from any of Lincoln’s speeches or letters.
After Lincoln’s death, someone reported a conversation (also known as hearsay) in which Lincoln might have said this:
I have faith in the people. They will not consent to disunion. The danger is, they are misled. Let them know the truth, and the country is safe.
Maybe CNN meant that quote; but note how they got it wrong (or deceptively edited it?). Or there’s another quote which, some years later, a writer attributed to Lincoln:
Let the people know the facts, let them see the danger; but let every effort be made to allay public fears, to inspire the masses with confidence and hope, and, above all, to frown down every attempt to create a panic.
Translation: Lincoln would be against CNN spreading fake, false, phony stories of Trumprussia collusion.
As Hemingway puts it:
Insofar as a hearsay quote should ever be tweeted out or inscribed in walls, at least it should be accurate. Particularly when it’s about “truth” and “facts.”
When I use a quote, I google it first to make sure. It takes two minutes. Except that, if I misremembered it, then I have to submit to reality and re-shape the post. I’m a minor blogger and I do all that. But CNN couldn’t be bothered. They live on a higher plane. (cough)
UPDATE: The New York Times isn’t much better. They recently mistook a parody site as a source of North Korea government quotes.
Correction: July 4, 2017
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article attributed incorrectly a Twitter statement to the North Korean government. The North Korean government did not belittle a joint American-South Korean military exercise as “demonstrating near total ignorance of ballistic science,” that statement was from the DPRK News Service, a parody Twitter account.
Once again, it is the elitism of the press assuming that their listeners, readers, or watchers are all stupid idiots
“When I use a quote, I google it first to make sure. […] Except that, if I misremembered it, then I have to submit to reality and re-shape the post. I’m a minor blogger and I do all that.”
We’re minor blog commenters and a lot (most?) of us do that, too.
We owe a great debt of understanding to Victor Klemperer, a 1930’s era Professor of Literature at the Technische Universität Dresden. “He kept notes throughout the years of the Third Reich on how the German language was twisted to serve the purposes of the Nazi regime these (notes) were published as LTI – Lingua Tertii Imperii: Notizbuch eines Philologe (“The Language of the Third Reich: A Philologist’s Notebook”) in 1947:
The “errors” which Trump brands as “fake news” are, in fact, the little does of agenda arsenic Victor Klemperer noticed and recorded.
Today, the internet is a formidable obstacle to propagandists. Trolls appear on sites such as GayPatriot with their NewSpeak and Progressive enlightenment, but their flight from and fright of critical thinking undresses them. Here’s Klemperer updated:
The New York Times, CNN and all the other “fake news” organs of Statism are losing ground because the sheeple are not buying into their “redefinition” by the elitist “over-cultivated national rhetoric” meant to do the thinking for us.
The “deep state” is another strain of the cancer of Statism. When the ideological, political agenda drives the ethic of the ideologues, their ethic is reduced to “what works under the circumstances” and trust, honor and fidelity are the casualties.
To be fair, it’s sometimes extremely difficult to find the correct iteration of a quote. But these guys make the big bucks for vomiting out something that’s supposed to resemble journalism or are representatives of journals. I had a devil of a time with a simple quote a few weeks ago. I found that it had been paraphrased several times & with someone slightly paraphrasing from someone else’s paraphrasing. The original paraphrased quote was obviously simplified for simpletons or to paste on a picture for a social media meme. That said, CNN is desperately trying to legitimize itself by quoting all sorts of things & whining about all manner of things in the past, pretending at patriotism, pretending at outrage, pretending at tradition as if the Democrat Media hasn’t been out to unseat every Republican president back to Eisenhower.
“… i’m a minor blogger and I do all that. but cnn couldn’t be bothered.” you want to tell the truth, cnn has a political agenda to advance.
Well, remember that the NY Times is that paper which does have an entire dedicated column for Paul (Fraud) Krugman to share his “thoughts” on “economic” policies at the macroeconomic level —
— because, ya know, Nobel Prize in Economics reasons, coming straight from…
http://imgur.com/a/eZCNQ
… The Krugman Zone
http://imgur.com/a/ylT8e
Ladybugs that still haven’t adopted collective farming out of fear for a would-be self-inflicted starvation STILL know more about economics than the NY Times’ top notch Keynesian celebrity.
And btw, fake or not, the quote, and its variants, is loaded with semantic vagueness issues (quite archetypical of the restless-as-usual leftist rhetoric gymnastic):
Eg, taking:
“Let them know the truth, and the country is safe.”
Oh yeah?
“Let them…”
Define “let”, please, thank you very much.
“Let” as in “drive (object) to…”? Or, as in “allow (object) to…”?
Etc.
“… and the country is safe”.
Meaning, as in a logical implication? By virtue of which higher order set of principles, then? (To establish the logic in which the implication may be modeled, verified, or falsified)
Thanks to some freedom/degrees of liberty enjoyed by free molecules (free to move and observable as such), or thanks to the engineering of bits, pieces, pawns by benevolent planners (of the spread of “the truth”).
Just asking because in Soviet Russia, too, the only official news source for the dear People was precisely called “Pravda”, if anyone needs a refresher that was a moniker for: “Truth”.
Finally, define “… country is safe”.
Country? What? Meaning, the inhabitants and their inalienable rights or just their bureaucrats and legislators’ serinity about how much they will be able to spend on madame #1, #2, or #3 and in which cat house for their next paid time off?
Etc, etc.
@7
But then again, what can we reasonably expect to see happen in one’s lifetime in regards to the examination and clarification skills of both the supply and demand sides of the Cognitie Numbing Network?
Now that’s a tough one.
*Cognitive Numbing Network
Oh, and bump @3, Heliotrope’s Victor Klemperer references.
I regard Jordan B. Peterson’s current brave stance and works as a sort of a contemporary analogue to Klemperer of ours, btw — although, in the tangentially related domain of psychology (instead of linguistics).
“Oh, but that wasn’t real…”
https://youtu.be/VsZJ0fJpLPc
“Right. It will work, next time.”
And Heliotrope may find this one also interesting, as there’s “something cool” which has begun recently:
(Leftist) Professors are embarrassed… that people actually start reading them
https://youtu.be/D3sewd_NPoA
May the Beast finally start falling.