FAKE NEWS: Gateway Pundit leads right-wing sites to the wrong Vegas shooter Geary Danley
As the chaos erupted at the Route 91 Harvest Festival, conservative website The Gateway Pundit led the way for right-wing readers, publishing the headline “Las Vegas Shooter Reportedly a Democrat Who Liked Rachel Maddow, MoveOn.org and Associated with Anti-Trump Army” and naming the shooter as Geary Danley.
Soon the news was circulated by Cougarboard, Dailey Alt News, and USSA News, aka “The Tea Party’s Front Page” but the facts told a different story: Stephen Paddock was the shooter.
The fake news was derived from his link on social media (Facebook) to Marilou Danley, whom police had described as a person of interest connected to the suspected shooter. Perhaps a source tried to connect the dots and the name got mixed but Marilou Danley has been found out of the country and is no longer considered a person of interest.
As Ryan Broderick of BuzzFeed news notes, at least six 4chan threads were circulating rumors that Danley was the shooter, with anonymous netizens posting that he is a “REGISTERED DEMOCRAT!” and “LITERALLY ANTIFA anti trump psycho.” To make matters worse, if you searched for “Geary Danley” on Google, the results linked to those false threads as “top stories,” making it look as if the rumors about him were news.
Google gave a statement to reporters on the matter:
Unfortunately, early this morning we were briefly surfacing an inaccurate 4chan website in our Search results for a small number of queries. Within hours, the 4chan story was algorithmically replaced by relevant results. This should not have appeared for any queries, and we’ll continue to make algorithmic improvements to prevent this from happening in the future.
Many outlets, like the aforementioned linked Washington Post story and Slate are on the warpath, calling out the “pro-Trump blog that the White House credentialed in February” and would certainly love to see the outlet removed from the access lists to the White House.
“Conservative trolls also heaped scorn on Marilou Danley, emphasizing her Asian roots and claiming that she is associated with “Filipino ISIS.” (Her descent is not currently known.) AltRight, a site run by white nationalist Richard Spencer, suggested that she may have convinced Paddock to convert to radical Islambased on flimsy reporting.”
As President Trump waved his finger at CNN and BuzzFeed for their FAKE NEWS reporting, it’s only fair these right-wing outlets get a beat down as well.
photo/ Gerd Altmann via pixabay
