Reverse double suplex

The Fair 'n' Balanced Network really had the snowflakes on the run Friday morning, didn't it? Or ... what did that frontpage spot look like 12 hours later?

 Let's try to get a few more wrestling metaphors into the hed there, shall we?

 That's better.

Anyway, the story:

Wrestler turned international movie star Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson body-slammed a British tabloid on Friday for posting what he called a “fabricated” interview featuring him bashing “snowflakes.”

Johnson took to Instagram Friday evening to “set the record straight” over a story published earlier in the day by The Daily Star. In the interview, he was quoted as lamenting the rise of snowflake culture and criticizing millennials’ need to search for reasons to be offended.

“Earlier today, online, an interview dropped with me, apparently it was with me, where I was insulting and criticizing millennials,” Johnson said in a video posted to his social media page. “The interview never took place. Never happened. Never said any of those words. Completely untrue. 100 percent fabricated.”

Wait -- he's saying a redtop out-and-out fabricated a story? About a CELEBRITY? Well, why is that our concern?

Media outlets, including Fox News, had picked up the story, in which the actor was said to have derided millennials for doing a disservice to war heroes by constantly complaining.

Fox was a little more enthusiastic than it lets on. It had already spun a companion story off the original fabrication before the rebuttal* caught up:

In fairness ("to be sure" is the technical journalistic term), it's technically possible that the Daily Star has exactly the exclusive it claims and the craven wrestler is running for cover on his agent's orders**:

He "laid the smackdown" on PC softies in an exclusive chat with the Daily Star.

While The People’s Champion applauds the fact nowadays anyone can “be who they want to be” the musclebound man-mountain raged at the constant offence snowflakes take from everything.

The legendary wrestler turned actor says it does a disservice to war heroes who fought for freedom of speech.

I don't keep up a lot with Dwayne Johnson's unscripted speech, so maybe somebody he's wont to lapse into British English collective noun agreement:

... “So many good people fought for freedom and equality - but this generation are looking for a reason to be offended.

So it sounds like we ought to to go with "at minimum, partially fabricated"; the Star is going to laugh all the way to the bank anyway, and Fox will have to go back to stoking its own outrages. But it's fun to note how a verb like "body-slams" can switch sides in such a hurry.***

* Both URLs point to the same story now, alas.
** See the comments at Fox; it takes a while to get down to the point where the text is updated, but it's worth the effort.
*** Maybe it means something different at Fox when you put in the hyphen than when you leave it out.

Did you hear the one about ...

Let's have a look at how far out of the gate a lie can get while the truth is still fumbling to get its pants on:

Facebook’s struggles with ‘fake news’ underscore the urgent need for a new social media legal framework, experts warn.

“It’s an enormous problem,” Keith Altman, a lawyer at 1-800 Law Firm, told FoxNews.com. “It’s the distribution, the infrastructure of these sites that allow the misinformation to be disseminated.”

So much bullshit, so little time! From a discourse analysis perspective, we might wonder about correctness conditions: Whom* does "concern" have to be "raised" among for the claim to fit in a standard subject-verb-object news hed? "Thousands flee Godzilla" or "Quake kills hundreds" wouldn't require that kind of analysis. Nor would "Series thrills Cubs fans," but "Series brings joy" is a different matter. All of a sudden, you need another object ("among Cubs fans") to avoid violating an objectivity norm. Fox** isn't telling us where it stands with regard to Facebook's liberal skulduggery, but it is telling us how we can tell where it stands.

Like the lede, the inside hed goes to that point more directly:

That's a nice bit of question-begging that helps the lie stay ahead of the game. Note the advance over Friday morning's take on the story:

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg defended the social media network’s news algorithm Thursday after accusations that the company allowed “fake news” to tilt the election.

“Personally I think the idea that fake news on Facebook—of which it’s a very small amount of the content—influenced the election in any way is a pretty crazy idea,” Zuckerberg said at conference in Half Moon Bay, Calif.

As the day wears on and the story shifts from a generic "foxnews.com" credit to a staff byline, we've gone from "accusations" of fake news to "Facebook's struggles with 'fake news.'" Nicely played, Fair 'n' Balanced Network!

"Experts say" is another standard objectivity routine. Attributing the opinion displaces its evaluative function from the news organization to the source; if the referee is looking, Fox still has the pivot foot planted on the floor. It'd be rude -- though it's (ahem) kind of a standard thing to teach in journalism classes --to ask: How many experts, and how expert are they in what? Back to the videotape with the afternoon version as it recaps the story-in-progress:
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