Real talk. On Tuesday while speaking in front of reporters, President Obama was presented with a question about his predecessor’s reputation as being “one of the worst presidents in history.” His response was fairly shocking. President Obama responded by saying, “President George W. Bush wasn’t as bad a president as people make him out to be. He did a lot of great things for our economy, national security and national debt.” A stunned room of reporters seemed taken back by Obama’s remarks. Well, all except those from Fox News who seemed to eagerly agree with them. Following the remarks, right-wing media pundits jumped on the opportunity to praise President Obama for his “honesty.” Rush Limbaugh said, “I always knew President Obama was a man of integrity and intelligence.” While Glenn Beck chimed in claiming, “President Obama epitomizes what it is to be a “Constitutional American.” But perhaps no comments were more shocking that those of Fox News personality Sean Hannity who said, “President Obama a great leader and a wonderful president, and I wish he could run in 2016 so I could cast my vote for Team Obama.” Right now, I know what most of you are thinking, “There’s no way any of this is true.” And you’d be right. First, let me apologize to those who’ve got this far, because nothing in this article is true. So while this isn’t a real story, congratulations — you’re not one of the individuals who allows themselves to be easily manipulated by misleading headlines. You don’t form assumptions based on reading only a headline and maybe the first paragraph of an article. See, in my writing I’ve noticed a very alarming pattern — people not reading the articles, but commenting on them. Meaning, people will read the headline, make an assumption which they then seem to believe to be fact, then perpetuate that belief without ever once reading the article. At that moment they take away “facts” base on nothing more than a handful of words. This is extremely alarming, and it’s happening by both conservatives and liberals. I know quite a few “liberal” media sites or Facebook pages who I’ve caught frequently writing headlines which are either extremely misleading or completely inaccurate. It seems millions of people are having their political ideologies built based on only headlines. They’re rarely reading many of these articles to find out if the information is credible. The headline is written, they read it and assume it’s real, and at that moment “fact” for them is created — and we wonder why so many people are so easily manipulated by campaign attack ads or Fox News commentary. The answer is pretty clear. While this has literally happened with every single article I’ve ever written, it was never more prevalent than with my “Fox News Hires Paula Deen For New Cooking Show” piece. It was a purely satire piece written to mock Fox News and how it wouldn’t be outside the realm of reality for them to offer Paula Deen a new show. And like with all of my satire pieces (of which there aren’t many), I clearly state at the end that the story is fake. Heck, even when posting them to a Facebook page I put a phrase that tells people, “You really need to read this story all the way till the end.” Yet, even with all of that, three different “debunking” websites had to debunk the article because apparently they were sent quite a few emails from people who thought it was true. Even though at the bottom of the article it clearly states the story was fiction. Which leads to the main reason why I wrote this particular article. It’s alarming for me to see how many people seem to form their entire belief system based upon only reading a headline. Even as I write this, I know at least 30-40% of the comments that will follow on Facebook will come from those who will have never read the article. I would highly encourage all of you who made it this far to share this article. See how many people you know will actually read it, or just base their opinion off the headline. Because I hope many feel as I do, that it sets a dangerous precedent in this country when millions of people are building their belief system and political ideologies based completely off headlines.
Posted on: Fri, 19 Jul 2013 02:50:12 +0000
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