Drudge Leaves White Alleged Accomplice Out Of Lane Murderer Montage

MATT GERTZ/Media Matters For America:

In an attempt to promote stereotypes of African-Americans as violent and dangerous, Matt Drudge is featuring on his website the photos of two black teenagers who allegedly killed an Australian athlete, leaving out the photo of their alleged white accomplice.

On August 16, Australian baseball player Christopher Lane was shot and killed while jogging in Oklahoma. Two black teenagers have been charged with first-degree murder in the case while a white teenager has been charged as an accessory for allegedly driving the getaway car. Conservative media have suggested that the shooting was racially motivated, despite the fact that one of the alleged perpetrators was white and that the local district attorney said he has seen nothing to "indicate that the killing of Christopher Lane was related to either his race or to his nationality." 

Conservative commentator Pat Buchanan, who has a long record of bigoted commentary, claimed during a Fox News appearance that the murder is part of a societal trend in which "interracial violence is overwhelmingly black-on-white." Drudge is featuring that commentary under photos of the two black teens charged with murder, leaving out their alleged white accomplice.

 

Drudge Report Gets Punked By ‘Jake Gyllenhaal’ Twitter Endorsement Of Mitt Romney

by Andrew Kirell |Mediaite

This evening, Drudge Report posted a headline that would likely perplex anyone who has followed the politics of various Hollywood celebrities.

Actor Jake Gyllenhaal, the news site read, has officially endorsed Republican candidate Mitt Romney for president.

The proof? Well, the outspoken liberal celebrity tweeted it:

Except one thing. That’s not Gyllenhaal’s actual Twitter account.

As others have documented before, the Twitter handle @Jake_Gyllenhaal is a fake account made by a fan.

As of 8:37 p.m. ET, the Drudge homepage had the following headline, which we’ve highlighted below with a helpful red arrow: “Actor Jake Gyllenhaal endorses Romney…”

But the headline has since been removed.

The Truth About The Obama Phone

By Judd Legum/Think Progress

On Thursday, the Drudge Report splashed a video of an undentified woman who claims to have recieved a free “Obama Phone.”

The video has captured the attention of the right online, who see it as proof that Obama supporters are dependent on government. On his show today, Rush Limbaugh weighed in:

So these are the people that don’t like Romney because of what he said about 47%? No, these are the 47%!… She knows. She knows how to get this free Obama phone. She knows everything about it. She may not know who George Washington is or Abraham Lincoln, but she knows how to get an Obama phone.

Thousands of conservatives are on Twitter, telling jokes about the #ObamaPhone.

There is one problem with the Obama Phone: It doesn’t exist.

Since 2009, there has been an urban myth that Obama created a program to provide free phones to low-income Americans at taxpayer expense. There is, in fact, a government program that will provide low-income people with a free or low cost cell phone. It was started in 2008 under George W. Bush.

The idea of providing low-income individuals with subsidized phone service was originated in the Reagan administration following the break-up of AT&T in 1984. (It was expanded and formalized by the Telecommunications Act of 1996.) The program is paid for by telecommunications companies through an independent non-profit, not through tax revenue.

Fox News and Matt Drudge turn ‘pirate’ gag into international incident

By Stephen C. Webster/Raw Story

If you were watching Fox News or reading The Drudge Report on Thursday morning, you might mistakenly believe that President Barack Obama blew off the prime minister of Israel this week to chat up a colorfully costumed man who looks more like “Captain Morgan” than any government leader.

“TOO BUSY FOR ISRAEL,” a “Fox & Friends” kicker headline read in all-caps, stamped below a photo of Obama sitting next to man dressed like a pirate. “PRESIDENT FINDS TIME FOR PIRATE, LETTERMAN.” Hosts Brian Kilmeade and Steve Doocy piled on, attributing the photo to “International Talk Like A Pirate Day,” an unofficial holiday marked every year on Sept. 19.

Co-host Gretchen Carlson added: “I’m going to have to see more on that story because it doesn’t totally seem to gel.” Still, the show went on, with the “Fox & Friends” production team repeatedly displaying the pirate photo and even cuing up pirate music. Doocy later said that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was “getting the Clint Eastwood treatment” from Obama, and showed a photo of the Israeli president cross-cut with an image of an empty chair.

Matt Drudge, the conservative media aggregator behind The Drudge Report, took the bait. “BUT NO TIME FOR NETANYAHU…” a headline on his popular conservative website declared, according to a record of the post captured by liberal watchdog group Media Matters for America.

It didn’t take long for savvy web users to point out that the pirate photo not is new. It turns out the image was taken as part of a Twitter joke for the White House Correspondents Association dinner, which typically features a night of political comedy and a satirical speech by the president. It has been available online since May 2009.

Reacting to the obvious blunder, a Twitter account for “Fox & Friends” corrected the repeat error. “The picture we aired this morning of the President & the pirate was from 2009,” they explained. Drudge, however, did not offer a correction.

This video is from “Fox & Friends,” broadcast Thursday, Sept. 20, 2012, as snipped by Talking Points Memo.

Drudge Hypes 1998 Obama Audio Using Cropped Quote

TODD GREGORY/Media Matters for America

The Drudge Report cropped comments President Obama made in 1998 about government's role in creating a society where everybody has a shot and used those cropped comments to portray Obama as a socialist. 

Drudge linked to a YouTube video supposedly taken from an October 1998 conference at Loyola University with a picture of Obama and the headline, "I actually believe in redistribution." The quote was picked up by Gateway Pundit blogger Jim Hoft who used the video to call Obama "America's Socialist In Chief."

But the quote leaves off the end of Obama's sentence: "at least at a certain level to make sure that everybody's got a shot."

Obama was actually talking about the role of government in providing services, but also criticizing ineffective forms of government. For instance, Obama says in the audio, "[W]e do have to be innovative in thinking, what are the delivery systems that are actually effective and meet people where they live?"

He was talking broadly about pooling resources to make sure that everybody has a fair shot.

Transcript of the YouTube audio:

OBAMA: Let me just close by saying, as we think about the policy research surrounding the issues that I just named, policy research for the working poor, broadly defined, I think that what we're going to have to do is somehow resuscitate the notion that government action can be effective at all. There has been a systematic -- I don't think it's too strong to call it a propaganda campaign against the possibility of government action and its efficacy. And I think some of it has been deserved. Chicago Housing Authority has not been a model of good policymaking. And neither necessarily have been the Chicago Public Schools.

What that means, then, is, is that as we try to resuscitate this notion that we're all in this thing together, leave nobody behind, we do have to be innovative in thinking, what are the delivery systems that are actually effective and meet people where they live? And my suggestion, I guess, would be that the trick -- and this is one of the few areas where I think there are technical issues that have to be dealt with, as opposed to just political issues -- I think the trick is figuring out how do we structure government systems that pool resources and hence facilitate some redistribution, because I actually believe in redistribution, at least at a certain level to make sure that everybody's got a shot.

New Romney Campaign Distortion: Falsely Claims Obama ‘Promised Today To Bail Out Every Industry’

By Aviva Shen/Think Progress

The Romney campaign, which has apparently exhausted the selectively edited clip of President Obama saying “you didn’t build that,” has seized on a new soundbite to distort. The campaign sent an email blast Thursday afternoon featuring a video of an Obama rally in Colorado from earlier that day and falsely claimed that he wants the government to bail out every industry. “I Want To Do The Same Thing With Manufacturing Jobs … In Every Industry,” it read.

The distortion comes from Obama’s speech in Pueblo, Colorado, touting his administration’s successful revival of the auto industry, which came back from the brink of collapse to add thousands of jobs and is now poised for its strongest sales since 2007. Obama said he wanted to help other flagging industries experience the same kind of success. Conservatives, however, are using the clip to make it sound like Obama wants to bail out every industry.

Here is what he actually said:

OBAMA: I said I believe in American workers, I believe in this American industry, and now the American auto industry has come roaring back and GM is number one again. So now I want to do the same thing with manufacturing jobs not just in the auto industry, but in every industry. I don’t want those jobs taking root in places like China. I want them taking root in places like Pueblo.

Just a few months ago, Romney tried to “take a lot of credit” for the auto industry’s rescue. Now, his campaign is warning against boosting similar prosperity in other industries that have suffered in the economic downturn.

The Drudge Report also featured a huge front and center link to a disparaging Politico story, which has since been “updated to reflect the president’s intent to express his support for manufacturing success. An earlier version was unclear about his intent.”

Deliberate misinterpretation is now a standard tactic from the Romney campaign playbook, starting with Romney’s very first ad, which ran a clip of Barack Obama saying, “If we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose.” Obama was in fact using the quote to criticize his 2008 presidential opponent, John McCain on his refusal to discuss the economic crisis.

Romney Embraces Right-Wing Conspiracy Theories During Ohio Town Hall

By Zack Beauchamp/Think Progress

Mitt Romney has singled out the Drudge Report as one of his favorite websites. But the candidate’s public embrace of the right-wing publication is more than an effort to win over conservative readers: Romney actually believes in some of the debunked conspiracy theories extremist groups peddle.

During a town hall in Ohio on Wednesday, Romney responded to question about the United Nations by declaring that the international body will undermine Americans’ Second Amendment rights and dictate how families should raise their children:

ROMNEY: Turning to the United Nations to tell us how to raise our kids, or whether we can have the Second Amendment rights that our Constitution gave us, I mean, that is the wrong way to go, right? Do not cede sovereignty. I’m happy to talk there. I’m not willing to give American sovereignty in any way, shape or form to the United Nations or any other body. We are a free nation. We fought for freedom and independence. We are going to keep freedom and independence.

Watch it:

The “guns” reference concerns Arms Trade Treaty, a U.N. initiative to prevent weapons from getting into the hands of terrorists and genocidaires. Both Drudge and the NRA have insisted that it poses a threat to American gun ownership. However, as ThinkProgress has documented, the treaty can’t and won’t: there are no provisions being negotiated in the treaty that affect domestic gun ownership, the State Department has publicly committed to rejecting any treaty that does, and Constitutional protections for gun ownership would trump a U.N. treaty according the Supreme Court even if a treaty infringing on the Second Amendment somehow made it through Congress.

Romney’s “Telling us how raise our kids” conspiracy refers to the notion peddled by pundit Dick Morris. He claims that the U.N. is coming for our children through the Convention on the Rights of the Child, a treaty expressing standards for the acceptable treatment of children that every country — except Somalia and the United States — has ratified. The Convention “can only be implemented through domestic legislation enacted by Congress or state legislatures, in a manner and time-frame determined by our own legislative process.” Thus, the U.N. can’t force the United States to pass laws interpreting Treaty provisions in any particular fashion and “contains no controlling language or mandates” for the signatory nations.