Why Did It Take Two Weeks To Discover Parkland Students’ Astroturfing?

Because the story's too good the way it's being told.

The response was professionalized. That’s not surprising, because this is what organization that gets results actually looks like. It’s not a bunch of magical kids in somebody’s living room....

On Twitter, I lost track of the number of bluechecks rhapsodizing over how effective the kids’ organizational instincts were. But organizing isn’t instinctive. It’s skilled work; you have to learn how to do it, and it takes really a lot of people. You don’t just get a few magical kids who’re amazing and naturally good at it.

The real tip-off should have been the $500,000 donations from Winfrey and Clooney. Big celebrities don’t give huge money to strangers on a whim. Somebody who knows Winfrey and Clooney called them and asked. But the press’s response was to be ever more impressed with the kids.

Read the whole thing.  The Left is organized for this sort of thing.  The Right doesn't have a clue.

Want to buy a demonstration of have someone fake outrage? It's easy.

Ever wonder where those demonstrators come from?  They could very well be unemployed actors earning $10 an hour. There's a company called Crowds on Demand that puts it all together for you.

The text says to arrive at an address on California Street in San Francisco’s Nob Hill neighborhood at 5 p.m. on a Thursday. Like my previous Crowds on Demand gig, I have no idea what my work is going to entail. All I’m told is to wear a suit.

Again, I’m running late. As I crest the hill at California and Taylor, I see elegantly dressed older couples streaming into a palatial white building. Photographers and TV news cameramen swarm around each pair, while a reporter blocks their path, bombarding them with questions. Getting closer, I realize that this isn’t a TV reporter — it’s Adam wielding a reporter’s hand-held mic.

“What’s your opinion on the Georgia edict?” he shouts at a couple in their 70s who veer around him, making a beeline for the front door.

“No comment,” the guy says. “We’re from Greece.”

“No comment?” Adam shrieks, as they duck into the building. “What are you saying? Greek people can’t stand up against bigotry?”

He spots me and comes over to say hi, making note of my lateness. Breathlessly, he gives me a hurried orientation. This is the California Memorial Masonic Temple, where Masons have gathered for their annual world conference. Recently, the Georgia grand lodge passed a bylaw — known as the Georgia edict — prohibiting homosexuality among its members. Our job? To pose as a TV news crew, confront Masons as they arrive for the opening gala, and challenge them to take a stand. “Just watch me for a few minutes,” Adam says. “You’ll figure it out.”

Sprawling camera crew in tow, Adam intercepts the Masons and interrogates them as they struggle to rush past him. Most ignore his questions, but now and then a couple stops to talk. “It’s a state’s rights issue,” a courtly, silver-haired man from Florida tells him. “Do I agree with what they’re doing in Georgia? No way. But one of the main things about Masons is, we don’t interfere with other chapters.”

Adam inches closer to the guy, raising his voice. “If you don’t agree with it, isn’t it your duty to stand up and say so?”

The guy shrugs. “I’m not a lodge master.”

Adam goes berserk or, as I observe him more closely, puts on a controlled show of going berserk. “What an embarrassment!” he shouts. “Listen, I go to the Equinox gym in Santa Monica. If the Equinox in Boston bans gays, I’m damn sure going to do something about it!”

Two cops barrel over, a burly male and a spike-haired female. The male cop says, “Hey! You guys can do whatever it is you’re doing. That’s your right. But knock off the swearing! There are kids around.”

Adam wasn’t really swearing, and there are no kids in sight. Left momentarily speechless, Adam allows the Florida Mason to hurry up the temple’s front steps.

Adam turns to me. “All right,” he says. “You got the idea?”

Actually, I don’t, but Adam deputizes me on the spot, passing me a mic. He assigns a ragtag band to shadow me — six altogether, ranging from 20 to 60 years old. We’ve got two photographers, two videographers, a soundperson with a mic on an extendable boom pole, and a young woman balancing the brightest floodlight I’ve ever seen in my life on a rickety monopod. We don’t look like any kind of TV news crew that I’ve ever seen — more like students in a community college filmmaking class — but for Masons visiting San Francisco from Arkansas, Oregon, Portugal, and Uganda, unfamiliar with the local media, maybe we’ll pass.

What brought my fake camera crew here tonight was a Craigslist ad Adam posted earlier in the week: “Adventurous videographers wanted,” with few other details. Emily Ivker is the person wielding the boom pole. She’s a recent college graduate from Wayland, Massachusetts, who just landed in San Francisco the previous week with dreams of becoming a travel blogger. “Twenty bucks an hour,” she says. “I couldn’t pass it up.” (Crowds on Demand wages vary depending on the type of job and the local cost of living: $10 an hour in New Orleans, double in the Bay Area.)

It's clled Astroturfing and you can bet your bottom dollar that a lot of what you see on the street, in rallies and on social media is paid for by some deep pockets.

Read the whole thing.

Ferguson protester protests not getting paid to protest.

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Rachel Maddow Fake Twitter Accounts and the MSM's lies.

Via Free Republic and Riehl World News. 

Being noticed is the key to ratings in the broadcast entertainment world.  So getting a lot of mentions on Twitter raises your visibility.  At Free Republic "tenger" comments:

Happens ALL the time in the twitter world. Millions of fake accounts out there being used to generate “social signals” for the search engines.

Lots of Twitter mentions is supposed to signal that Rachel Maddow is popular, that lots of people watch her, and that you should look in to see what all the excitement's about.  It's a form of "AstroTurf," a fake way of appearing to be a grass roots movement which actually is orchestrated by an organization that remains behind the scenes and has very few actual supporters.  It's the way the media builds itself up in importance and the way the Ruling Class maintains its power.

 

Here's a comment from Celebrity Sentry:

MSNBC MADDOW 1,052,000
That was her ratings on Wednesday night.
She finished 11th out of 11 cable news shows.
 

Jon Stewart's Daily Show draws about 1.3 million viewers, lagging behind Family Guy, a cartoon show and something called Robot Chicken (a show I had never heard of) which uses stop-motion animation.   There is a more complete list of ratings here.  But give Stewart some props, he's way ahead of Stephen Colbert, another Liberal comedian/pundit who hosts the Colbert Report with less than a million viewers.

What I love about these posts that prove our clown-emperors are not only naked but media-created emperors, is that people get all angry over my reporting of this fact. I know, I know -- I'm supposed to be so outraged by Bill Maher that I don't focus on these two sacred cows, but I just can't help myself.

 

In my opinion, the real power influencing the "low information" voters are the local newspaper and the local news shows. They run the stories that reinforce the Liberal line.

As an example, I received a call late yesterday afternoon from a local TV station asking if I wanted to appear on a segment they were doing later that evening. The report was going to be on what to do after you get your layoff notice because of the sequester. I declined for several reasons, but among them was the fact that I did not want to contribute to the panic that the media was trying to create about the horrors that were going to happen because the rate of increase in government spending was not going to be as large as originally planned.

 

Here is the news version in the Virginian Pilot with quotes from all the horrible things that can happen unless the government is given more money.  And here is Donald Luzzatto telling us the end is nigh. Here's his version of the Apocalypse. 

• ... imagine 10 or 15 Ford plants closing. 
• ... this region is going over a fiscal cliff.
• ... Congress can't tie its shoes (Obama isn't around).
• ... take a machete to the budget .
• ... rock-throwing and tantrums.
• ... worst threat to the welfare of Hampton Roads that most of us have ever seen.
• ... One of every 20 working folks would lose their jobs.
• ... Two parents in every classroom [would lose their job].
• ...One house on every block [would lose it's job?].
• ... eviscerate the nation's safety net.

Do a little test;  look for the name Obama in that editorial. 

You won't find it.

In the press and most other media today Obama has nothing to do with anything that that goes wrong.  If you read or hear them, he is trying to prevent all that those evil, rich Republicans are doing to you.  That is why the low information voter still blames Bush after he's been out of office for over four years and for part of that time Obama and the Democrats have controlled the House, the Senate and the White House.  And still Donny Luzzatto can't make himself say that Obama's part of the problem.  If there is a problem, it's the generic "Congress." 

What incredible bullshit!

 

At least two “Republican women for Obama” are Democrats.

John Hinderaker

It happens all the time in talk radio: a caller will say that he is a lifelong Republican, and will recall fondly how he voted for Ronald Reagan. Then he says that today’s Republicans have gone too far, and for the first time ever he is voting for a Democrat! These callers are nearly always lying. If you look them up, you likely will find that they are Democratic Party precinct chairmen.

The Obama campaign is trying to perpetrate the same deception. It has just released a video called Republican Women For Obama, which features four or five women who claim to be Republicans, or to have been Republicans until recently. But, of course, they are appalled by Mitt Romney–it is hard to say why, apart from a couple of discreet references to abortion, but did they really just now figure out that the Republican Party is pro-life? The ad is surprisingly ineffective, but it is also dishonest. At least one of the women who pose as “Republican women for Obama” is a long-time Democrat.

 



Her name is Maria Ciano, and BuzzFeed finds that she has been a registered Democrat in Colorado at least since 2006.



Wait a minute, here's her mother who is another one of the "Republican women."

The women in the video aren’t named, but she is Delia Ciano–none other than Maria Ciano’s mother

 

 



Is this an indication that Team Obama could not find even a handful of Republican women who are planning to vote for Obama just to have their birth control pills paid for by the taxpayer and provided by the Catholic Church? Are all of Obama’s “followers” fake? You have to wonder what is going on? Who are they trying to fool?

My wife, who is a Republican woman, has just left to attend the Republican convention in Tampa - her first - despite the fact that Tampa is in the path of a hurricane. I suspect that there is an electoral hurricane headed for Obama. After a big storm, there is always some debris to pick up but there is also a feeling of freshness, of cleansing … that the earth has been swept by the wind and washed clean by the rain. That is what the day after this election will feel like to most Americans.

 

 

Independent Rush boycott group coordinated with Media Matters

Professor Jacobson tracks the coordinated efforts to get Rush off the air. 

I have been covering political boycotts frequently since the inception of this blog, including the Prop 8 boycotts, the Mormon Boycott, the DNC boycott, the Beck boycott, the King & Spalding boycott, boycotts of various states for various reasons, the anti-Israel boycotts, and so on.

So when the boycott of Rush Limbaugh started as a result of his comments about Sandra Fluke, I took an interest.

There has been a lot of coverage regarding my post, Media Matters astroturfed the Limbaugh secondary boycott. The post was based in substantial part on interviews given by Angelo Carusone, Director of Online Strategy for Media Matters, who was not bashful in claiming credit for Limbaugh’s loss of advertisers, particularly in the early days of the boycott.

The post was linked by Instapundit and others and had gained a lot of attention by the time Limbaugh used it for his first tweet.

In response to the Limbaugh tweet, a non-Media Matters group called Boycott Rush, organized by former congressional candidate Krystal Ball and someone who tweets under the name @shoq, asserted that it started its efforts before and independent of Media Matters. Among other things, I was falsely accused of working for and being paid by Limbaugh to tarnish the anti-Rush movement by tying it to Media Matters. A comment also was made about my “professional future” (these tweets are from March 18):

Read the rest.