‘Too Good to Check’?

By Nate Hochman

Monday, October 17, 2022

 

On Friday, the Atlantic’s Yair Rosenberg called out Ted Cruz for sharing — and subsequently deleting — the fake headline of a nonexistent Atlantic story, “The Evolution of White Supremacy,” ostensibly detailing how Muslim parents who “oppose teaching pornography to children” are “the new face of the far right.”

 

Of course, amplifying hoaxes is bad, and deleting the post, and apologizing for it, is the right thing to do when you fall for a fake. But Rosenberg’s subsequent implication that this was somehow an indication of irrational right-wing fear-mongering — “it would be even better for all concerned if he reflected on the reasons why he was so easily fooled by a hoax” — ignores why a fake like this was so believable in the first place. Here are two pieces published by major mainstream outlets in the subsequent 24 hours:

To reiterate: The Atlantic headline was a fake, and Cruz was right to delete his tweet. He should have checked to verify its legitimacy before tweeting out the screenshot in the first place. But to say that it was wrong is not to say that it isn’t understandable. Rosenberg uses Cruz’s mistake to scoff at the very idea that anyone could believe such an absurd headline. That’s a tough position to hold when the New York Times is running headlines like “The Rise of the Far-Right Latina,” Pulitzer Prize–winning journalists are arguing that the reason “Latinos support Trump at the second highest rate” is because large segments of the ethnic category are white, and Washington Post political reporters are tweeting takes such as: “These days, I am reminded quite often that you do not have to be white to support white supremacy.”