Robert Stacy McCain @ The Other McCain:
After yesterday’s incident in which labor union activists tore down an Americans for Prosperity tent in Lansing and sucker-punched Stephen Crowder, this headline zoomed up the Memorandum aggregation:
Breitbart Folks Appear to Fake Violence in Lansing
Huh? This was a decidedly odd piece of blogging: The claim that somehow the union thug clobbering Crowder was part of a right-wing hoax, based on such “evidence” as the event having been reported by “James O’Keefe’s buddy” Lee Stranahan — because, hey, if anybody at Breitbart thinks it’s actually news, that means it must be phony, right?
Also, the video was edited. Anybody who edits a video is obviously engaged in some kind of evil conspiracy.
What the hell is this silly gibberish? Are these people crazy?
No, they’re engaged in a systematic effort to create confusion and discourage mainstream journalists from reporting on the incident.
“Accuse the accusers!” Re-arrange the narrative of events so that a story that obviously makes the Left look bad is, instead, a story about the Right unjustly trying to make the Left look bad.
This perversion of the narrative makes the teller of the tale (“Crowder works for Fox News! Stranahan works for Breitbart!”) the pre-demonized focus of the story, the villain whose tale can’t be trusted by any mainstream, legitimate journalist. And you can bet that any MSM reporter who does try to report honestly on what happened in Lansing will be brutally excoriated by Media Matters and others on the Left for taking this incident seriously as actual news.
Crowder is being smashed “through a plate glass window,” so to speak. If conservative New Media and citizen-journalists call attention to such an incident, that very fact — the involvement of conservatives, and their interest in the incident as news — will be leveraged by liberals as part of the counter-narrative to discredit and de-legitimize the story.