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As NFL anthem controversy grinds on, fake news stories abound. Here are eight

Did Seattle Seahawks player Michael Bennett burn the U.S. flag (under a sprinkler)? No. FACEBOOK VIA BUZZFEED

The #takeaknee controversy starring some NFL players, their president and culture warriors of all stripes shows no sign of ending any time soon.

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Unavoidably, fake news purveyors have indulged the temptation to throw some gasoline of their own on the fire that was already there.

1)

Did the Seattle Seahawks’ Michael Bennett burn the U.S. flag (under a sprinkler) as his teammates whooped in delight? No; the widely shared image above is a Photoshop job.

Here’s the original:

2)

LeBron James didn’t wear a shirt saying “We march, y’all mad. We sit down, y’all mad. We speak up, y’all mad. We die, y’all silent” last week; it’s a Photoshopped version of a shirt he wore in 2014 saying “I can’t breathe,” a reference to the last words of Eric Garner, who died that year after New York police put him in a chokehold. (In this case, it’s not clear what the point of the fake was supposed to be, since the fake and real shirts have similar political messages.)

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WATCH: President Donald Trump told Fox News on Wednesday that the NFL could have avoided players kneeling during the U.S. anthem had it suspended Colin Kaepernick last season when he began taking a knee.

3)

Did Oakland Raiders players punish Derek Carr for standing for the U.S. national anthem by letting him be tackled unnecessarily? It was a conservative radio talking point, but Carr himself disagreed.

4)

U.S. president Donald Trump didn’t sign an executive order taking away the NFL’s non-profit status; the photo was shot at an unrelated event by Reuters back in January. In any case, the AP points out, the league gave up its tax-exempt status in 2015. (Trump made statements this week implying he’s not aware of that, however.)

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5)

Did the flight crew of a Boeing 737 (“combat-hardened American heroes”) carrying the New Orleans Saints ‘take a knee’ and abandon plane, players and all in the middle of a runway? You can probably guess the answer. The story has the authority-figure-humiliates-dissenter theme that we see over and over in fake news.

6)

Did the Pittsburgh Steelers fine players who skipped the anthem $1 million? You can probably guess the answer to that one, too. Politifact supplies some context: the original story came from thelastlineofdefense.org, a satirical liberal site that trolls conservatives, and was picked up uncritically. (The players are paid a lot by normal-people standards, but not so much that you can just start slapping them with million-dollar fines.)

7)

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Is Fox boycotting the NFL because of the protests? That’s what thelastlineofdefense.org reported, but then again they also say that they “present fiction as fact … if you believe this crap you’re a real dumbass.” That’s a very robust approach to full disclosure, but didn’t stop the story from being republished on a range of dubious sites, minus the disclaimer.

8)

Reports that Colin Kaepernick said he would stand for the anthem if he was signed by an NFL team were strongly denied by Kaepernick. The claim originally came from a CBS reporter who later retracted it. (Snopes explains the sequence of events in more detail).

h/t to BuzzfeedPolitifact and Snopes.


It was as he contradicted this report that Kaepernick quoted Winston Churchill as saying that “a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”

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As it turns out, Churchill probably didn’t say this, or wasn’t first to; the version I learned was attributed to Mark Twain, and ended” … has a chance to put its boots on,” but Twain may not have said that either.

Kaepernick has the better version — the vision of truth frantically trying to put on its pants as a lie sails away over the horizon is irresistible.

But the fact that it’s much quicker (and far cheaper) to make up lies than to find out stubborn, complex truths is fundamental to the conflict between fake news and real journalism in our own time.

The original may have come from Jonathan Swift, a shrewd, caustic observer of human societies:

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WATCH: U.S. President Donald Trump said that NFL team owners want to discipline football players kneeling during U.S. anthem but they’re too “afraid” of them during an Interview on Fox News’ Fox & Friends.

In fake news news:

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