I’ve been wanting to blog about the hilariously idiotic suggestion, made by someone purportedly an expert on Fox News, that Birmingham is a city inhabited only by Muslims, with non-Muslims simply not going there. This is a case of someone saying something which is not merely an error, but indicates clearly that they are making things up and have no idea what they are talking about. This isn’t a “blunder,” it is evidence that Steve Emerson willfully and deliberately asserts things for which he has no evidence. There is no other explanation. You don’t have to know much about Birmingham to find this laughable.
I’m trying to think of a way to work a discussion of this into my “Speaking about Religion” class, in a manner that doesn’t simply involve pointing and laughing, but something more substantive that can help with learning fact-checking skills that can be applied to more subtle instances of nonsense and deliberate deception.
The outburst of mockery that has filled Twitter has used the hashtag #FoxNewsFacts. Scare quotes don’t work well in a hashtag, but even though you can’t see them around the word “facts,” they are there.
In the Telegraph‘s round-up of some of the hilarious tweets, I noticed that Daleks had made their way into the fray:
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