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This week, something extremely predictable yet extremely funny occurred: A tweet appeared with an astonishing, yet extremely believeable claim that immediately caught fire on social media and beyond.
“Can’t say for sure,” mused Twitter (whatever) account rickrudescalves, who has since very understandably locked down his account, “but [JD Vance] might be the first vp pick to have admitted in a ny times bestseller to fucking an inside-out latex glove shoved between two couch cushions (vance, hillbilly elegy, pp.-179-181).”
After this statement, several teachable moments emerged that were also extremely funny, and very satisfying to yr friendly neighborhood debunker who lives on spite and schadenfreude, and oh, am I dining out in style today.
Let’s take a look!
The first thing that happened was this claim, naturally, went viral as people appreciatively passed it around as a joke. BUT THEN…
Lesson 1: Adding numbers or measurements to a false statement increases the likelihood that people will believe it.
Studies show that it shorts out something in 32 percent of casual readers’ brains. I just made that up. I have no idea if there are studies like that and I’m too goddamn lazy to look it up, but it sounds really authoritative with that number in there, doesn’t it? And that’s how Donald Trump and his cadre get away with it all the time, though they show their hand a lot by relying too heavily on the numbers “14” and “88.”
Ha ha ha, but that’s a discussion for another post!
So the original couch-fucking post gained a layer of credibility by adding an authoritative-sounding APA citation, which contributed to the claim escaping containment.
It helps that absolutely no one read that terrible book.
Also, Vance does nothing to help this image of himself as a weird little creep with negative charisma, what with his public fixations on “childless cat ladies” and “childless couples” and whatever other disturbing shit he’s ranting about at any given time. I mean, who cares what a couch-fucker thinks, am I right?
PREVIOUSLY IN THIS FUCKIN GUY!
(Allegedly!)
This brings me to my next lesson. Pay attention, class, because this one is really important and also extremely funny.
Lesson 2: You can’t prove a negative.
This is also how the Trump people and all his creepy little far-right buddies have managed to get so far. You don’t need to prove anything! You just sling shit all over the place and let the people you cover with it scramble to deny what you said. That just spreads the shit more! It’s like that classic Lyndon B. Johnson statement. Make that sonofabitch deny he fucked that pig! Make them publicly deny it, and then give it to the memelords.
Like, how do we know JD Vance didn’t fuck a couch? We’re going to have to see some proof of this, please. Oh, he doesn’t have proof that he didn’t fuck a couch? Why is he doing this to all those poor couches?
(Allegedly!)
Won’t somebody, please, think of the couches?
And there you have it, the foundation of the smear machine and information war strategy. That’s how a bunch of academics and journalists got fired, that’s how a bunch of American citizens (private citizens! not even politicians!) got dangerously slimed, that’s how it’s worked all along.
Unfortunately for news organizations, they’ve fired all their debunkers and fact-checkers, and then spent the last few months disregarding all the lessons we patiently tried to teach them over the past decade about how to properly stop a false and unprovable claim from spreading.
Normally this fact causes me grave despair, but not this week. This week I am so delighted! Eat shit, everyone who thought this job was easy!
Anyway, it culminated in a marvelous headline and photograph combination, a pure work of art really, from Associated Press, which made the whole thing a billion times funnier. The AP, following in the footsteps of your Wonkette, tried to debunk that JD Vance had fucked a couch:
Just look at that headline right smack over JD Vance’s shit-eating grin! Now there’s a man who doesn’t care who knows he put his dick in his couch! Or maybe it was someone else’s couch! Ew. You show `em, JD!
(Allegedly!)
Put this shit in a museum.
The Wonkette Debunking that the AP followed!
So then, the whole thing got even funnier, at least to me, when AP first tried to change their headline to what I guess it should have been in the first place, although I’m not sure it would have actually helped, and then retracted the story altogether. “The story, which did not go out on the wire to our customers, didn’t go through our standard editing process,” an AP spokesperson told The Verge this morning. “We are looking into how that happened.” It didn’t go out on the wire, and yet it went out to email subscribers like your Wonkette editrix, who put it in her morning tabs shortly before it went to page-not-found heaven!
“Lol,” say I, and also, “lmao.” Good thing all the rest of the news organizations didn’t follow suit!
Oh.
Sucks for him!
And so we come to our next module in the training course.
Lesson 3: Don’t write a headline in a way that perpetuates the false rumor.
But of course, everybody did. I would have thought it was pure malice, and good for them too, if AP hadn’t retracted the story altogether and then put out a statement about the damn thing, magnifying the Streisand Effect even more. There’s no way this was done on purpose. In fact, there’s a sort of genius to blundering of this magnitude.
But they weren’t the only ones! Good old Snopes, bless their hearts, even went the extra mile by specifying our weird large adult boy fucked the couch cushions. Or excuse me, he didn’t fuck the couch cushions. You just know someone there was congratulating themselves on their precision and extra attention to detail.
Sure, I’m the first to admit that the joke is pretty played out by now but I’ll still give $20 to the first reporter who asks JD Vance why he denies his history of couch-fuckery at a press conference, which is like $2000 in non-journalism dollars so you know I’m serious!
The best part about this is that now we all know this sort of thing is possible, and it’s going to happen again, and again, and again, at least until news organizations restaff their fact-checking departments and start valuing debunking again.
But not today. They really fucked the couch this time!
Help us pay all the unemployed journalists in the world, if you are able!
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