Indignant journalists furiously fact-check obviously fake Bloomberg video

“This is trouble,” said Rolling Stone senior writer Tim Dickinson, “edited without plainly being satire. Has the effect of dishonest propaganda.”

National Journal’s Matt Holt said elsewhere, “This is what we call disinformation, folks.”

The Washington Post’s fact-checker himself, Glenn Kessler, even said, “One has to seriously question the credibility of any campaign that would push out such a manipulated video. … This is a dangerously slippery slope that will lead to a nuclear war of fake videos.”

The video that has members of the press up in arms highlights the moment that the former New York City mayor demanded of his 2020 Democratic primary opponents, “I’m the only one here that, I think, that has ever started a business. Is that fair?”

In real life, Bloomberg’s question was followed by maybe one or two seconds of awkward silence before he continued, making the case that his experiences as a businessman make him the best-equipped to take on President Trump. However, the video shared later by Bloomberg’s campaign makes it seem as if the awkward silence lasted for almost an entire minute. You can thank slick editing for that.

If the video appeared with no clear indication of intentional manipulation, then journalists would be right to be concerned about a top-polling 2020 Democratic candidate spreading disinformation online. As you can see, though, it has all the obvious tells of a joke, including goofy close-ups and cricket sound effects. The people treating the video as a serious attempt by a campaign to deceive the public are maybe taking themselves a bit too seriously.

“Hard to argue this doesn’t qualify as ‘significantly or deceptively altered’ media under Twitter’s new policy,” said Lawfare’s Jacob Schultz.

CNN’s Alexander Marquardt added, “This fake video comes directly from Bloomberg’s campaign.”

“Team Bloomberg edits last night’s performance, drawing out his rivals’ silence to make them look like dummies,” said Drew Harwell of the Washington Post. “Where have we seen this kind of trick before? From Team Trump, with Pelosi, earlier this month.”

For members of our vaunted Fourth Estate, the video is no laughing matter. For them, the Bloomberg meme represents a clear attempt to mislead voters with deception and trickery. Personally, I thought the cricket sound effects were a bit of a dead giveaway that the video is intending to be humorous, but what do I know?

“This is not how it happened,” said Jessica Smith of Yahoo Finance.

BuzzFeed’s Rosie Gray added, “This isn’t how this exchange happened.”

“Well — this is not what we saw on TV last night,” said ABC News John Santucci.

Politico’s Christopher Cadelago even asked the Bloomberg campaign to respond to fact-checks of the video, to which the campaign responded, “It’s tongue in cheek. There were obviously no crickets on the debate stage.”

You don’t say.

Elsewhere Thursday morning, the most powerful and influential news organization in the United States published pro-Taliban disinformation authored by suspected terrorist Sirajuddin Haqqani of the Haqqani Network infamy. You probably did not hear about that. After all, practically no one in news media is talking about it. They are too focused right now on the real threat to the republic: goofy memes on social media.