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  • 2017-07-19 (xsd:date)
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  • Did Barack Obama Say 'The Country Owes Me a Debt of Gratitude'? (en)
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  • In July 2017, a number of right-leaning news and opinion web sites simultaneously reposted a six-month-old online editorial piece implying that former United States President Barack Obama believes the country owes him a debt of gratitude for his eight years of service in the White House. The reposted article is striking on various counts, not least for the fact that nowhere in it is President Obama quoted as saying such a thing. The false attribution has nevertheless been used as the headline in virtually every instance of the article's aggregation, as exemplified in these blurbs found on Facebook: The editorial itself, originally published on the notoriously hyperpartisan Conservative Daily Post on 16 December 2016, purported to challenge the favorable assessment Obama gave of his own administration's accomplishments during one of the last press conferences held during his presidency. Discerning readers will note that in lieu of a substantive critique, the author chose to further stoke the already existing anti-Obama sentiment of his audience by piling on epithets such as delusional, stinks of entitlement, and blatantly disrespectful: Most tellingly, the author's claim that Obama literally thinks we owe him something was conjured out of thin air. If the President had said or even implied any such thing, there is no evidence of it in the article, much less in the transcript of the December 2016 press conference. So, what's to be gained by fabricating such a statement and attributing it to the former president? We can think of at least two motivations: politics and money (though not necessarily in that order). Some people, clearly, are ideologically motivated to share this kind of propaganda. For example, witness this true believer who converted the text into a YouTube video: But others, such as the Serbia-based owner(s) of The Breaking News Today, and the Macedonia-based owners of USA Breaking News, Morning News, and Infowars Today (to cite just a few examples of foreign-owned web sites promulgating the Obama story), were likely in it for the advertising revenues. The town of Veles, Macedonia, in particular, was known to be a hotbed of young pro-Trump fake news producers, according to a 15 February 2017 feature in Wired, many of whom have become extraordinarily wealthy grinding out propaganda for U.S. consumption: One might suppose that Trump's electoral victory would have been bad for business, but the U.S. market for pro-Trump fake news -- even months-old pro-Trump fake news -- is still booming, probably due to the constant storm of controversy surrounding his administration. A sharp uptick in interest in the Obama debt of gratitude article leading to its aggregation by more pro-Trump sites occurred during a week in which it was announced that Donald Trump, Jr. had held a previously undisclosed meeting with a highly placed Russian lawyer during the 2016 presidential campaign, GOP legislation to repeal and replace Obamacare appeared to be tanking, and the president's approval rating fell to 36 percent. Coincidence? Possibly, but we suspect not. (en)
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