6 Stories That Prove The Media Sucks At Reporting Politics

Now that Hillary Clinton has officially thrown her hat into the presidential ring, the rest of us are gearing up for a year and a half of Facebook blocking and artful misdirection when politics comes up at the dinner table. The media, on the other hand, is already hard at work figuring out how to get as much traffic mileage as possible out of every political gaffe.

Here are the first of what will probably be thousands of B.S. political news stories the media refused to get right.

#6. No, A Congressman Didn't Say We Should Feed The Homeless To Wolves

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Lots of places have a problem with icky homeless people. According to The Washington Post, Mother Jones, and Bloomberg, Rep. Don Young of Alaska has a solution: Let fucking wolves eat them.

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Mother Jones


Bloomberg


Ah, the old "question mark headline" trick.

Letting newspapers have their cake even when the cake is a lie.

What kind of heartless, disgusting maggot of a human would suggest feeding the country's most vulnerable citizens to wolves? No one, it turns out, but you wouldn't know it from the headlines above. What really happened is Young is from Alaska, a state that knows a thing or two about attacks from gray wolves. So when his fellow congressmen debated the merits of keeping gray wolves on the endangered species list, Young had some strong opinions. One, that states that don't deal with the wolves shouldn't weigh in on the discussion, and two, if they did have wolves, all their homeless people would be dead. It was a joke ... a stupid joke, but a joke.

Which was why everyone sitting in on the session snickered and let Ol' Representative Hobokiller keep running his mouth without thinking twice about whether or not he seriously suggested using wolves to solve homelessness.

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No word on his plans for homeless wolves, however.

#5. Wisconsin's Governor Didn't Say Unions Are As Bad As ISIS

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Unions are one of those sticky subjects that everyone seems to have an angry, condescending opinion on while knowing shockingly little about them. Apparently, that's what Slate, AOL, and Daily Kos thought was going on when Wisconsin's Gov. Scott Walker, who is possibly gearing up for a presidential run in 2016, said that standing up to union protesters has prepared him to take on the terrorist group ISIS.

Islamic State


Obviously, these guys just want fairer wages and better healthcare.

His actual words were, "If I can take on 100,000 protesters, I can do the same across the world." That's pretty damning, right? But as a different Slate article points out, those headlines gloss over Walker's actual point. He wasn't saying that union protesters are the same thing as terrorists; he was referring to dealing with two difficult tasks.

What he was trying to say, albeit very awkwardly and extremely misguidedly, was that confronting those union protesters was hard, but he succeeded, and he'd do the same with ISIS. It's not like he doesn't know they have guns and that the two tasks would require completely different approaches. We think.

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"We just pass a law against terrorist groups. Do I have to do everything?"

#4. Calm Down, Obama Isn't Calling For Mandatory Voting

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One of our greatest freedoms in this country is the right to vote. Our second greatest freedom is the right to not give a shit and stay home because it's cold in November. But if you believed CNN and The Washington Times, Obama doesn't care if you don't feel like voting, because he's about to make it mandatory.

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Sorry, sisters. Jesus will have to wait.

Except, no, he didn't. What actually happened is that President Obama was talking about how political money influences elections and one possible (and, he emphasized, short-term) solution is to do what other countries do and have mandatory voting. He didn't, at any point, say, "Hey, let's do that." He just said that it's one of many potential ways to fix the problem. Kind of like when you tell your kids that one solution for a clean room is to burn all their belongings but you don't really mean it. (Plus, Obama knows mandatory voting probably wouldn't work anyway.)

When the administration pointed out that the media's version never happened, they didn't issue corrections. Instead, they said that Obama "walked back" and "retreated" from a stance that he never actually had in the first place.

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