Judge Dredd wannabe Nancy Grace is finding herself on the defensive as Ben Siebert, falsely dubbed the ‘Selfie Stalker,’ is filing a defamation lawsuit against Grace. Grace, never one to let the facts get in the way of a sensational story to boost her ratings, made no effort to correct her mistake.
The lawsuit filed Monday in Denver says Grace, who hosts a show on Turner Broadcasting’s HLN network, incorrectly told millions of viewers that Ben Seibert invaded a woman’s home and snapped a photo of himself on her phone, which she described as a “textbook serial killer’s calling card.”
Seibert said Grace humiliated him with her commentary, which went viral on an array of social media sites where readers called him a weirdo, a sicko, a rapist and a pervert. The suit says Grace didn’t check the facts and didn’t care.
Wow, Grace didn’t check the facts and didn’t care? As far as I can tell, this is normal operating procedure for Nancy Grace. It goes something like this:
Accuse an individual of wrongdoing
Use emotional language and imagery
Report only facts which seem to support her theory
Launch into ad hominem attacks against anyone who suggest she is jumping to conclusions or that the accused is innocent until proven guilty
“It hasn’t been easy for him as a result of this,” Seibert’s attorney, John Pineau said.
Denver Metro Crime Stoppers released Seibert’s photo on Jan. 29, after a woman called police saying a man had entered her home while she was putting her children to bed. Police said she was especially fearful because she believed the man had taken a selfie with her phone inside of her home.
But further investigation showed the picture was Seibert’s Facebook photo that had been taken elsewhere. Seibert, who was working in California, called police Feb. 8 after friends told him his photo was being associated with the Denver home invasion. He was not charged.
The same month, police told Grace her broadcast was false, but she continued to air it, according to the lawsuit, which seeks more than $100,000 in damages.
Personally, I think $100k is too low. Nancy Grace needs to be taught a lesson. We all make mistakes. If she had taken steps to correct this error and learned to take a different, more ethical approach to her ‘journalism’ such a lawsuit would be unnecessary. The damage she has done to advance the lay person’s understanding of the criminal justice system, however; cannot easily be quantified.
We, here, at The Liberty Papers do not generally share our correspondence, but the big issues of the day are, in fact, talked about at length in our site’s Google Group as we coordinate what we’ll be talking about at this lovely blog. Without being specific or quoting anyone directly, I would like to put forward what the group reaction was to the so-called ‘GruberGate’ scandal. In a word:
‘Meh’
If you’ve been living under a rock or watching nothing but MSNBC (same difference, really), I’ll give you a quick summary of what GruberGate entails. For six years, conservatives have blasted away at the Affordable Care Act (hereafter, the ACA). For six years, we’ve been talking about how the promises made by people trying to get it passed were impossible to keep, how the bill would raise the deficit, make healthcare more expensive and less stable, drive away doctors, narrow your networks of providers – basically the exact opposite of every claim put forward by Democrats between 2008 and 2012. The media uncritically reported White House talking points for most of that time, doing absolutely zero digging and finding no evidence of problems with the law as a result.
Then some guy who’d lost his insurance after being promised that that wouldn’t happen and decided to do some actually investigating. Within a day of beginning his search, he found video footage of one of the ACA’s chief architects, Jonathan Gruber, candidly discussing the ACA with his peers in Academia in which he said THIS (follow the links to see the videos), THIS, and THIS.
Many things have been said about GruberGate, and I won’t rehash them here. The response to this story by many libertarians (not just those of us writing here) has been a collective “well duh!” We have, after all, been talking about everything that Gruber willingly admits in his various talks on the ACA – that it’s a pack of lies intended to fool the American taxpayer by fooling the Congressional Budget Office, that it amounts to a giant national experiment and the architects have no clue what it’ll do, that expanded coverage can’t happen without raising revenue to pay for it, and that the archetype (RomneyCare) was already a failure, being propped up by federal dollars all along. We knew all of that. The insults he lobs at the American voters aren’t entirely unfounded either. Many Americans, like it or not, vote without any idea of what they’re supporting. So why should we get up in arms over it.
After arguing rather cantankerously with my fellow bloggers here, trying to explain why this story enraged me so, it dawned on me what was really going on in my head. I may come to self-awareness later than I should on occasion, but I generally get there if I think on it long enough. This whole story – the story of the Affordable Care Act from conception, to birth, to signing, to repeal efforts to angry Americans who feel lied to and voting R to prove something to the left to the GruberGate controversy…it is a microcosm of everything I’ve been battling for years.
When the ACA was first being discussed, the conservative reaction was a combination of people like those in my family, who were horrified by the likely outcome of such a bill and who relied heavily on health insurance to make their various medical problems affordable to treat, but who reacted by studying the proposal and attempting to logically argue as to why it was a very bad bill indeed…and people screaming at town hall meetings because they just instinctively feared such a big, sweeping change. It’s human to fear change, and in this case their fears were justified, but instead of focusing on doing the work of exposing the lies in the ACA, most of conservatism was consumed with death panels and doomsday imagery of Uncle Sam examining a woman’s lady parts (yes, that was a real conservative ad).
Now I’m not saying I think the IPAB is good for “end of life” care…it’s not. But ‘death panel’ rhetoric sounds literally insane to your typical low-information swing voter who might be swayed by bringing a convincing argument to the debate. And, of all of the conservative reactions to the ACA, which ones do you suppose were primarily covered by the media, by ACA advocates and in the political discussion on Capital Hill – the reasoned arguments as to why the ACA would fail and make things worse, or the fear-mongering?
But guess what – that made someone like me who worked hard to understand the problems with the ACA into a looney tune screaming about death panels when I voiced my opposition to the law before any leftist. They accused me of being a liar. They accused me fearing change. They accused me of not caring about the poor and the uninsured. And they had the support of, once again, an uncritical, unserious mainstream media telling them any concerns about the ACA raising costs, impairing the system, causing doctor shortages or narrow networks, etc. were just crazy conservative fear mongering. Our detached, empirical expert, Jon Gruber, says so – read the study.
When the truth came out – when it turned out that Jon Gruber believed everything I did about the ACA except the part about those results being bad for healthcare…when he gleefully admitted that RomneyCare was a failure economically, that the ACA had nothing to do with making healthcare affordable, and that he and his colleagues had no clue how to bend the cost curve down – and then had the audacity to call us stupid for believing him, I would have been satisfied. I wouldn’t have been angry for long – it would have brought some semblance of peace to be vindicated in the fight. Except that the reaction of the left was to lie even more, minimize Gruber’s roll in crafting the bill, and then…call conservatives fear mongers again for reacting to this story with anger and for losing trust in government to solve problems like these.
This is inherently the entire problem I have with the left – every time their bad ideas don’t work and people realize it, they find the loonies in the conservative ranks and make those guys their opposition, and when you try to bring reason to the party, they accuse you of just being one of the loonies. And when you turn out to be RIGHT…oh well whatever nevermind. That fight never mattered anyway – on to the next fight.
Until conservatives are willing to call liberals (and other conservatives) out for not fighting fairly, for distorting the history of the argument, for scanning through the crowd for the easiest person to attack, for straw men and lies, for parliamentary tricks and poor research, and for their ugly assumptions about the American people, we will always lose the argument. Always. And that…is what is truly terrifying me into anger. We were right. All along, conservatives were right about the ACA and the insincere, cynical motives of its creators. We were right, they were wrong, and somehow, we still lost the argument. And it’ll happen again and again until we get angry enough to turn the tables on them – to call them out on their unfair tactics and their bad science and their twisted, utilitarian assumptions.
We’re about to have the same fight on immigration. Learn to recognize their tactics and fight back, or there will come a day when you remember how right you were about the negative consequences of an open border, and how little it mattered that you were right.
Only a few outlets have actually run with this (Nick Gillespie @ Reason being one, sadly), based on the quote below:
“I hope to be able to do this again,” Johnson said Monday on “The Steve Malzberg Show” on Newsmax TV. “I’d like to. I would like to.”
Usually when politicians announce their candidacy, they have things like multiple interviews all lined up, a functional website to unveil, etc. They usually coordinate this with their twitter feed, which Johnson hasn’t updated since Oct 13, and on other social media. Oh, and they usually don’t announce the day before a midterm election when they know the news cycle will completely ignore them.
Something about that quote, however, made me suspicious. They don’t say “I hope to be able to” and “I’d like to”. They say things like “I hereby announce…”
Gary Johnson said no such thing. If you watch the interview, he spends 10 minutes talking about the issues. At the very end of the interview, the host Steve Malzberg started talking about 2016.
After Johnson issues the above quotes, you hear Malzberg say “alright folks, you heard it here first” as you can hear Johnson in the background protesting.
If that was someone announcing their candidacy for the Presidency, it’s the lamest announcement I’ve ever heard.
I’m just going to go out on a limb and say that Newsmax exaggerated this one for clickbait.
Either #GamerGate is about ethics in journalism or it is about harassing women. Thus proclaims Taylor Wofford in a recent article for Newsweek. Operating under this presumed dichotomy, Newsweek surveys the tweets and finds that:
[U]sers tweeting the hashtag #GamerGate direct negative tweets at critics of the gaming world more than they do at the journalists whose coverage they supposedly want scrutinized.
Therefore, concludes Wofford: “GamerGaters care[] less about ethics and more about harassing women.”
In Wofford’s mind, “direct[ing] negative tweets at critics of the gaming world” necessarily equates with “harassing women.” This erroneous equation arbitrarily homogenizes women, assumes that agreement with social justice critiques of the gaming world are an essential element of being female, and silences the voices of all women who disagree with those criticisms.
What Wofford and so many others fail to recognize is the existence of Secret Third Option C: #GamerGate is not about journalistic integrity or about harassing women, but is a backlash against social justice fascism. In a wonderful article, I encourage everyone to read, Cathy Young, writing for Reason summed it up as follows:
This is an anti-authoritarian rebellion, not an antiwoman backlash.
Yet Wofford and his ilk do not even recognize this as a possible motivation. Or perhaps they do, but treat it as the equivalent of “harassing women,” an assumption that only works if one presumes all women march lockstep with the likes of Anita Sarkeesian.
I don’t.
I don’t have a problem with violence against fictitious women as props in video games. I don’t have a problem with fictional women being sexualized as background scenery in video games. If I did have a problem, I just wouldn’t buy the games (or, since I am not a gamer, the books and movies). I think other people should be free to buy what appeals to them. If they like space, then they might want to play one of These games, for example. If they like horror, there are plenty of games out there for all their zombie-killing needs. If they want to play games with background violence and sexualization of female characters that don’t even actually exist in the real world, then they should play those games. I do not think that because women are capable of other roles, they must never be portrayed as damsels-in-distress. I do not think that portraying women (or men) as objects of sexual desire implies they lack other value.
What does rub me the wrong way are people who want to sanitize the world, who want to dictate how we are allowed to interact with each other, and what sort of fantasy lives we are permitted to augment with fictional books, movies and video games; who want to remove all the darker fringes and seedy nooks from our mental landscapes and herd us all into a more civilized and domesticated imaginative realm; where every fictional woman must be treated as representative of all real women and heresies against the enlightened orthodoxy are not permitted.
Since this is how I feel, it seems logical to me that a not insignificant number of #GamerGaters might also feel this way. Since I am not misogynist or interested in “keeping women in line,” it seems logical to me that a not insignificant number of #GamerGaters could be motivated by a desire to push back against social justice crusading without disliking women in general or wanting to “harass” them.
When critics deny these alternative motivations exist, or insist that they necessarily equate with misogyny, they are in effect silencing my voice and the voices of all women who feel as I do. When the critics insist that hatred of one woman or one group of women equates with hatred of all women generally, they treat us as a homogenous class without distinction or individuality.
Here’s a great observation for Lucy Steigerwald writing from Rare:
Whether the shooting of Brown by Wilson was justified or not, it’s important to remember that there were good reasons people distrusted the Ferguson police’s narrative of events.
Police did everything wrong after Brown was killed. They left his body in the street, they refused to answer questions or identify the officer. They used military tech to answer the protests that resulted. They repeatedly teargassed crowds, arresting peaceful protesters and members of the media.
Officer Darren Wilson shouldn’t be punished for the impression that people — especially minorities — have of the police. If he doesn’t deserve prosecution, he shouldn’t be prosecuted. Whether he deserves harsh, little, or no punishment is still up for debate.
Read the whole thing. The entire article is worth quoting but I thought I would just wet your beak.
