Let's play telephone

Remember playing telephone as a kid?  The rules were pretty simple: a group of kids (players) sit in a circle, one person whispers a secret to the person sitting next to them, that person whispers the secret to the next person, and so on and so on until it reaches the last person who then repeats what they heard out loud to the group.  After repeating the phrase enough times it will (theoretically) change little by little until it becomes a totally different statement. Most adults probably haven’t played this game in years (unless they have children) but, thanks to the American mainstream news media, the basic practice of "telephone" still unintentionally takes place every day.

Let me give you an example of what I'm driving at with this analogy. 

The conservative-leaning National Review recently published an article on their news website about what would happen if a North Korean nuclear warhead hit Hawaii. Unlike most articles about the North Korean nuclear threat, this piece wasn't designed to scare the readers. Quite the opposite, actually, as it gave a reasonable explanation about why most Americans would survive if a nuclear missile hit Honolulu. 

Here's an excerpt of the piece by David French:

“The bottom line, even if a nuclear weapon as big as the largest North Korea has ever tested were to impact squarely on Manhattan, the vast majority of New Yorkers would survive the initial blast. A strike would devastate central Honolulu but leave many suburbs intact. If the missile misses a city center even by a small amount, the number of initial casualties plunges dramatically.” 

The article is suggesting the reach from the blast of these nuclear missiles won't go as far as many people seem to think (and we can thank Hollywood for misleading us on this topic in the past). If you're in a suburb of a big city, it probably won't get as far as your home. Similarly, if it misses the center of a large metropolitan area, even by a little bit, the number of projected casualties greatly decreases.  Seems pretty straight forward, right? This is not a political statement - it's just a cut and dry explanation of the projected impact from one of North Korea's nuclear warheads.  Great! This should be good news to both American conservatives and liberals alike, right? After all, nobody wants to die in a North Korea nuclear holocaust.

And so begins the game of "telephone".

Left-leaning Newsweek, a well known media outlet with a history of spreading misinformation, decided to publish a piece that regurgitates [incorrectly] what National Review is trying to say with their North Korean nuclear war piece.  

 Observe, if you will, the following headline:

 “Nuclear War? It Won't Get You in the Suburbs, Conservative Magazine Tells Readers” 

According to Newsweek, the National Review told their conservative readers that it won't get them in the suburbs. Really? Wait a second, that's not quite what the article is implying. This NR piece wasn't designed to make people think they're impervious to nuclear war, but instead to tell them where they will be most and least safe if a nuclear war actually took place. The analysis is so far off that base that one has to wonder if Newsweek's Graham Lanktree even read the National Review article. 

But wait, the game of "telephone" continues.

Joy-Ann Reid is a host and correspondent for MSNBC, another well known left-leaning media outlet [who also has a history of spreading misinformation]. If you're on Twitter you've probably seen Joy at work in the past. She loves to spout off misleading, hyperbolic statements to more than a million of her Twitter followers. Joy obviously doesn't read the National Review, but she does read Newsweek! After stumbling across the Newsweek analysis of the National Review piece, she mixed up the facts faster than Puff Daddy remixing an 80s-era pop song (does he still do that?).

Joy said the following on Twitter in response to the Newsweek piece:

“…The conservative argument in favor of risking nuclear war is, “don’t worry, it will only kill Democrats and minorities.”

Minorities and Democrats? Joy, the NR article doesn't even use those words, much less in this context. But you wouldn’t know that because you clearly never read the piece. 

When the National Review says, "A nuclear warhead that hits the middle of a city probably won't spread as far as the suburbs," Joy (inaccurately) interprets that to mean, "Nuclear war will only kill Democrats and minorities, so don't worry."  The real kicker here is that Joy seems to be suggesting minorities only live in the city and conservatives only live in the suburbs. Wow! A statement that prejudice portrays the kind of stereotyping that would get a conservative fired from most corporate news outlets in America.

Could you imagine if Tucker Carlson told his Fox News viewers that black people only live in the city and conservatives only live in the suburbs? Not only would his audience disagree, but he'd probably be reprimanded by his employer for making such an inaccurate and misinformed statement.

 The right is often accused of sensationalizing the news, but in a world where stories like the faux Golden-Showergate scandal and a 3rd hand account of Trump calling Haiti a "s***hole" become front page stories with 24 hours of coverage on the cable news networks, it's become pretty obvious which side of the aisle is caving to the most exaggeration.

I guess what I'm saying is, liar liar pants on fire, MSNBC and Newsweek.

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Credit to Julia Galef for being the first to notice this absurd exchange of information.