Dolphin Fighting
by digby
Didn't we just get another lecture from a journalism professor about how lazy, dumb and unprofessional bloggers are? Lookie, lookie here, from Gawker:
"The case against Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick has exposed a split within both the NAACP and the larger African-American community, as some activists condemn Vick's role in the deaths of fighting dogs and others cast him as a victim of a racist justice system," an MSNBC article revealed yesterday. Who are some of the dog-murdering quarterback's defenders? Well, you'd expect Al Sharpton to step up, right?
Here's the blurb from the MSNBC story:
Most recently, the Rev. Al Sharpton, a two-time Democratic presidential candidate, charged that a star white athlete never would have been prosecuted for the same crime.
Like Hayes, Sharpton has denounced images of dogfighting in popular black culture, and he signed a letter with Russell Simmons condemning the activity as ignorant and cruel.
But at the same time, Sharpton argued that the prosecution of Vick was overkill.
If the police caught Brett Favre (a white quarterback for the Green Bay Packers) running a dolphin-fighting unit out of his pool, where dolphins with spears attached to their foreheads fought each other, would they bust him? Of course not," Sharpton wrote Tuesday on his personal blog.
They would get his autograph, commend him on his tightly spiraled forward passes, then bet on one of his dolphins.
Turns out that Sharpton quote, allegedly from his "personal blog", actually came from the parody site News/Groper. Who would have ever guessed?
The editor of the site, terribly impressed with MSNBC's investigative skills as you might imagine, wonders which one of these clues finally tipped them off:
1. The words "fake parody blogs" in the titlebar of every page of our site
2. Our logo
3. Al Sharpton blogging on the same site as Lindsay Lohan, George Bush
and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
4. Our about page www.newsgroper.com/about/
5. Al Sharpton referring to himself in his bio as an "Emancipation
Proclamation enthusiast"
Maybe MSNBC's crack reporters are fans of former NBC election analyst Rush Limbaugh who tells his listeners that the Democrats want to invade Darfur so that they can appease their African American constituency (like they always do/) It's hard to imagine anyone sentient would believe Sharpton would come up with with the "dolphins with spears on their heads" thing. He's colorful but he isn't retarded.
What's the explanation for this stuff? Is everyone eating lead paint chips and salsa all of a sudden?
Full screen shots here.
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