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30 Sep 2011 19:45

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World: Follow-up: More on the videos YouTube blocked in the UK

  • Due to the source of the content, we wanted to do some fact-checking on the banned videos we noted in our post earlier today. Nothing against Infowars.com, the authors of the original article, but we felt it was worth a double-check. So, here we go. Above is a clip of a bizarre protest that took place in March, which involved members of a nationalist anti-authority British organization called the British Constitution Group. The protests, which were covered by both BBC and The Daily Mail (which has significantly more detail and photos), showed a group of people claiming that a bankruptcy proceeding around one of the group’s members was illegal. They attempted to make a citizen’s arrest of the judge; the Magna Carta was cited as the reason they were allowed to make the citizens’ arrest. (We told you it was weird.) Above is video of what happened. If you’re in the UK, you will not be able to watch this video; If you’re in the U.S. and want to see what a blocked video looks like, click through to this proxy. Granted, the video is months old, and its blocking is also months old, but there we go. After some fact checking, we can prove that this video was in fact blocked. source

25 Feb 2011 14:25

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Politics: More on Rachel Maddow, PolitiFact and other fun stuff

  • In case you didn’t see our comment on Rachel Maddow’s war of words with PolitiFact, we’d like to point it out again for your kids. We think that there is a lot of context worthy of your time. Above is Maddow’s clip from last night, which, while accurate in pointing out that PolitiFact isn’t always right, does the same kind of cherry-picking that PolitiFact did. From the report, they only quoted a two-second part of a clip that has much more direct context at play. Tommy Christopher at Mediaite took a swing at this whole issue, too, and you know what? He noticed the same thing we did about her surplus/deficit quote. “That passage can be read both ways, but in at least the semantic sense, Politifact is wrong. Their reading of this passage is a matter of interpretation.” In other words, while the exact quote Rachel Maddow pulled proves PolitiFact’s headline is in fact “False,” the problem is that the larger context, which claims that Walker turned a surplus into a deficit (the point of the article), is closer to the truth than Maddow’s people will like. Sorry, Rachel. source