Sunday, March 04, 2018

Giving a Stellar Example of Dishonesty, Daily Show Uses Deceptive Editing of CPAC Conservatives to Brand Them as Mindless Buffoons (Video)

And you wonder why Donald Trump calls it Fake News?!

I think we should all be eternally grateful to the Daily Show for sending The Opposition w/ Jordan Klepper to CPAC (tak til TFP), as Kobi Libii, Tim Baltz, and Jordan Klepper give a stellar example of dishonesty in the mainstream media or, certainly, in the comedians that the MSM is always celebrating (video here).

What it also shows is, as Instapundit's Glenn Reynolds continuously points out, that you should always record an MSM interview with your own hand-held device. (In our defense, everybody was being interviewed right and left, and we had no idea that this group was composed of independent (sic) satirists from Comedy Central.) Update: Speaking of which, thanks to Stephen Green for the link.

In one instance — at least — each and every single line of an "exchange" comes from totally different points in the "interview" (sic).
CPAC 2018: More Shootings Call for More Guns 
The Opposition with Jordan Klepper CPAC 2018:
Jordan, Kobi Libii and Tim Baltz visit CPAC to learn about Republicans' heroic unwillingness to solve America's mass shooting problem.
In the experience of the No Pasarán blogger in the Stars and Stripes shirt, at least, the interview lasted 20 times the amount of time in which he appears that included a lot of give-and-take as well as intelligent or at least reasoned arguments.

First remark: A lot of what appears in the entire episode seems to be no more than simple fluff talk ("yeah", "right", "absolutely", etc) strategically and dishonestly moved to appear as mindless agreement with satirical comments (for an example of this, go no further than the two "Right, exactly" comments of the very first interviewee). A similar technique was described by Kevin Williamson in the following words:
This technique is known as “the Jon Stewart.” What you do is take a few seconds (or, in [the case of Katie Couric], a few minutes) of reaction shots (the footage they shoot of people’s faces while other people are talking) and then insert that non-talking footage after a question is asked: Voilà, the opposition is literally speechless.
1) the 400 mass shootings a year remark (0:44)

At 0:44, the conversation with the No Pasarán blogger is shown going like this:

•  Liberals keep saying, there are like 400 mass shootings a year in America…
• "Move on, liberals!"
• That's right!

Needless to say, that is an outrageously dishonest cut that deliberately ignores the point that was being made.

First of all, notice the cuts: as it happens, each and every single one of those three lines comes from totally different points in the interview.

That the argument is cut may not come as a surprise, but even the "That's right!" does not come immediately after "Move on, liberals!" It's a bit of fluff talk from elsewhere expressly moved to make the interviewee appear mindless.

Back to the argument being made. From memory, it went like this:
Liberals keep saying, there are, like, 400 mass shootings a year in America [DAILY SHOW CUT]. But why is it that nobody, no conservative, no liberal, no pro-gun activist, no anti-gun activist, can mention those 400 shootings a year? Why, in other words, aren't/weren't 99% of them reported? Why can most people, whatever their point of view, not quote more than three or four shootings a year? Well, first of all, the number of dead in the definition of mass shootings has been reduced to appear meaningless. Just as important, most of the mass shootings are not reported for the simple reason that they involve criminals shooting one another.
Are these facts irrelevant?

Should they be ignored in the debate?

Yes, if you are a liberal trying to demonize your opponents.
Related: the BBC's statistics behind gun violence —
Mass shootings in the U.S. have fallen so much in the past century
that the political left has had to redefine what a mass shooting is

Everytown for Gun Safety's list was compiled to give the public an exaggerated impression of how many school shootings have taken place. Notes Glenn Reynolds:
IT’S FUNNY THAT THE GUN-CONTROL FOLKS CAN’T SELL THEIR PROGRAM WITHOUT, YOU KNOW, LYING
At this point of my Jordan Klepper interview, regarding the 400 mass shootings a year, I made a joke that we've been using here at No Pasarán for the past 10 years:

• Do you know why statistics are like a bikini?
• Because they reveal a lot, but… they hide the essential.

That's a great line (if I may say so myself), whoever is making it, and you would think that that one-liner would make the cut of a TV show and/or a comedy show, but it makes conservatives look less than humorless and clueless clods, so it ended up on the cutting floor.

The follow-up can be included in point 2 below:

2) ridiculous asides (3:21 et al):

Here is another point in their technique, which you can see at 3:21:

The blogger at No Pasarán is making a (more or less intelligent and/or reasoned) argument — one which you never get to hear — and Jordan Klepper starts bringing in, goading us with, irrelevant comments ("the cashier at Gadzooks, or the hot topic person piercing ears, they should have an AR").

At this point the person interviewed agrees, he or she fluffs, for the simple reason that it is (kind of) irrelevant and he or she want to get back to the point they are making, but all that is deliberately sent to the cutting floor.

The argument in this case that Kobi Libii, Tim Baltz, and Jordan Klepper failed to keep were as follows: liberals want America to be more like Europe, more say like Scandinavia, but in 2011 Anders Breivik killed more people in Norway than were ever shot in any school in the United States or even during the worst mass shooting in U.S. history. Do you think the teen-agers at Utøya island would have approved of somebody present with guns?

This comes from another (reasoned) argument from my in-depth examination of the gun control issue, a version of which was published in the New York Times two years ago:
It is easy for leftists, American as well as foreign, to tout the success of the gun control laws in the rest of the western world and to say that "this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries” when you ignore:
• the 1996 massacre of 16 children at a Scottish primary school;
• the 2000 killing of eight kids in Japan;
• the 2002 deaths of eight people in Nanterre, France;
• the 2002 killing of 16 kids in Erfurt, Germany;
• the 2007 fatal shootings of eight people in Tuusula, Finland;
• the killing of 10 people at a Finnish university less than a year later;
• the 2009 killing of 15 people in Winnenden, Germany;
• and, needless to say, Anders Breivik's 2011 mass murder of 77 Norwegians, most of them teenagers;
• not to mention the various terrorist attacks of the last few years, such as the 2015 mass shootings inside the Bataclan nightclub which killed 90 Paris revelers.
Is it unrealistic — or uncouth — to wonder whether the tolls would have been lesser had a few of the adults in each place carried a weapon and tried to shoot back at the respective killers?
3) The Forrest Gump remark (1:52)
 
The Forrest Gump remark is deliberately misleading too — natch — because Jordan Klepper turns the issue into the basic innocence in Tom Hanks's fictional character in a sweet comedy, whereas the real issue is the very tendency among liberals to regularly portray mental cases as harmless messiah-like beings who turn out to be (far) more loving than us regular people, superior souls who touch everybody they meet.

In this perspective, Jordan Klepper comes with other deliberately ridiculous asides ("you're drawing a line between Forrest Gump and school shootings" CUT "and that's a line people are afraid to draw" CUT "shooting with an AR-15 — Forrest Gump") that the interviewee seems to agree with ("that's it"), for the simple reason that he wants to get back on message.

What really happened during the interview, indeed, is that I specifically countered the assertion, pointing out that the point is not Forrest Gump himself, or even the vast majority of mental cases, most of whom probably are harmless, but the tendency to see all mental cases as basically harmless, and thus failing to intervene when the handful of dangerous ones need to be put under some form of control. Straight to the cutting floor.

The Forrest Gump quote comes from  What Is to Blame for Mass Shootings? Does the Blame Lie with the Right to Bear Arms Or Can It Be Found Elsewhere?

Here is the relevant excerpt from the lengthy and in-depth post that I consider one of my best in 14 years of blogging:
I wonder what happened, or started to happen, in the 1960s and 1970s…

Oh — that's right: the left's youth revolution with the "victory" of more and more of the "modern" ideas of the progressives…

Now let's see — what did, and what do, these entail?

Well, among other things, the triumph of the ideas of compassion, of tolerance, of understanding…

Of empathy for all kinds of groups, not least the mentally ill — who turn out to be nothing more than merely misunderstood and who therefore deserve freedom from straitjackets…

And the ensuing political correctness demanded the dismantling of mental institutions or the limiting of their use and refraining from confining mental cases (who of course turn out not to be mental cases) thereto. ("Guffaw! You want to keep insane asylums open?! How can you be so reactionary, so backwards?! It's everybody else who should be in a nuthouse! Snort!")

We should not judge these people, we can not judge these people; with some compassion and understanding, if only we are willing to make an effort, we can allow such people to live amongst us.

Rather than the judgments we pass on them, which show our cluelessness and — our hatred… (Maybe we — us "normal" people — are the mental cases! And maybe we need to be institutionalized!)

Mental cases are even given hero status in the left's narratives (winning several Oscars from Hollywood in the process) — as indeed are all the usual members of the left's victimhood brigade (women, gays, blacks, Indians, primitive peoples living close to nature, etc etc etc).

From Forrest Gump to John Coffey via Raymond Babbitt, these messiah-like beings turn out to be (far) more loving than us regular people, superior souls who touch everybody they meet, leading to miracles by helping "normal" (blinded) people to become better human beings and fulfill their destinies, if these saints do not healing said mortals outright, physically or otherwise.

In other words, what artists, and leftists, are basically helping to "prove", over and over again, is that the average American, the average citizen, the average human being (who is unlike themselves) is a clueless and/or bigoted "deplorable" (someone obviously in need of some sort of betterment treatment).

As with everything else the Left touches, slowly, one brick at a time, common sense is overturned, and normal, regular law-abiding, citizens are demonized and made to be those who obviously ought to be the true outcasts of society (among other things, these bigoted oafs obviously ought to be without weapons or the rights thereto).
N Joe, who used to blog for No Pasarán many years ago, says that whereas half a million people were institutionalized half a century ago — when the U.S. population was far lower — in our day and age, the number of people committed to asylums is, thanks to leftist "compassion" policies, as low as 5,000.

But again, back to the relevant issue here, which is:

We should all be eternally grateful to the Daily Show for sending The Opposition w/ Jordan Klepper to CPAC (tak til TFP), as Kobi Libii, Tim Baltz, and Jordan Klepper give a stellar example of dishonesty in the mainstream media or, certainly, in the comedians that the MSM is always celebrating.

Update — from the archives: This problem of people not knowing satire from reality is likely a phenomenon of the Daily Show Generation by Benny Huang:
In a piece titled Liberals Can’t Tell the Difference Between Satire and News, and GOP Presidential Campaigns Are Paying the Price, [Jim] Geraghty noted examples of fake quotes, attributed to Republicans, that were nonetheless perceived as genuine by people already inclined to hate their supposed speakers.
  … This problem of people not knowing satire from reality is likely a phenomenon of the Daily Show Generation. I consider myself part of that generation, though not a fan myself. Regardless of whether I actually watch the program, many people my age (I’m thirty-four) and many members of the generational cohort fifteen years my junior, consider the Daily Show to be a real source of news, along with The Colbert Report, The Onion, Last Week Tonight With John Oliver, and Saturday Night Live. For some, it’s the only news they get.

And they brag about this. No, seriously. They snicker at the Left’s latest object of scorn while clapping like trained seals at all of Jon Stewart’s jokes, even the unfunny ones, which happens to be most of them. They love to tell you how savvy they are about current affairs. When I was in college, students actually wrote columns in the campus paper arguing that people who got their news from the Daily Show were actually smarter than the average bear.

 … These people remind me of grown adults who still think that professional wrestling is real, except WWE fans aren’t nearly as smug. 
"See you at #CPAC2019"

 



Update 2: After, later in 2018, it was announced that Sacha Baron Cohen's satirical seven-episode “Who is America?”, exploring "the diverse individuals … across the political and cultural spectrum, who populate our unique nation”, it transpired that, according to a source familiar with the project, "it was nothing more than a Hollywood hit job on Trump supporters and the Republican Party."

This led one of the victims, Sarah Palin, to issue the following response:
Yup – we were duped. Ya’ got me, Sacha. Feel better now? I join a long list of American public personalities who have fallen victim to the evil, exploitive, sick “humor” of the British “comedian” Sacha Baron Cohen, enabled and sponsored by CBS/Showtime. This “legit opportunity” to honor American Vets and contribute to a “legit Showtime historical documentary” was requested of me via a speakers bureau.

 … For my interview, my daughter and I were asked to travel across the country where Cohen (I presume) had heavily disguised himself as a disabled US Veteran, fake wheelchair and all. … The disrespect of our US military and middle-class Americans via Cohen’s foreign commentaries under the guise of interview questions was perverse. Here is my challenge, shallow Sacha boy: go ahead – air the footage. Experience tells us it will be heavily edited, not pretty, and intended to humiliate.
Update 3: Whether it's comedy and satire or serious and weighty matters, leftists, even at the highest echelons of power, always seem ready to use to deception to take remarks out of context:
Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., and Planned Parenthood have come under fire after accusing Judge Brett Kavanaugh of describing contraceptives as “abortion-inducing drugs” -- when he was only summarizing the position of a pro-life group.

 … Pro-choice and anti-Kavanaugh groups seized on his reference to "abortion-inducing drugs." Harris tweeted out the video, but cut out the preface that showed Kavanaugh making it clear he was summarizing the arguments of Priest[s] for Life. The video therefore presented the reference as his own. … Planned Parenthood, in a press release, also left out the words “they said” …

 … White House Deputy Spokesman Raj Shah said the video was an “obvious act of deception.” Senator Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee said that the controversy was proof that Kavanaugh had performed well at the hearing.

"If Senate Democrats are resorting to editing videos of Judge Kavanaugh’s answers to make him look bad then he must have done well," he tweeted.
Update 4: It turns out that, already in the summer of 2017, Comedy Central had broadcast a show on guns which, as Christian Toto explains, was just as dishonest with conservative points of view as the CPAC one:
'Jordan Klepper Solves Guns' recycles the same liberal talking points without letting the other side speak.
What is obvious about Comedy Central's hour-long special? asks Hollywood in Toto.
It’s hopelessly biased against the 2nd Amendment, the NRA and anyone who supports gun ownership in 2017.

 … Klepper has solid comic timing and offers some choice ad-libbed comments. Too bad he’s deathly afraid of talking to someone savvy on the “other side” of the gun control debate.

 … At no point does Klepper let a smart, rationale gun rights expert counter the show’s battery of vague arguments and context-free statistics.

  … Guns are bad. End of story.

 … The special’s sober through line? Attacking the NRA. It’s all that organization’s fault. The group lobbies too aggressively and spends too much money to be defeated. It employs “buttloads of fear” and “patriotic manipulation” to get the job done.

Never mentioned? The Brady Campaign, Everytown for Gun Safety and Michael Bloomberg’s massive war chest supporting gun control initiatives.

Why, it’s like the special is being disingenuous on the subject.


 … The irony that [Klepper is] deathly afraid of hearing a sane soul on the other side of the issue, or changing his own mind, is lost on him. And [on] the special.


 … It hardly helps that Klepper might be the most smug comedian of the modern age. The fact that he repeatedly acknowledges that fact can’t change reality.
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