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Huippuvideo, kiitokset!
Täältä voi lukea koko "surkuhupaisan" kissansyöntivaleuutisen taustat:
https://www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p ... pets-claim
NewsGuard's Reality Check
By Sam Howard and Jack Brewster
How a rumor involving an unidentified cat owner ended up on the presidential debate stage.
In just days, a bizarre and baseless claim accusing Haitian migrants of eating pet cats in Springfield, Ohio, went from an obscure Facebook post in a private group to a talking point by Republican Donald Trump during Tuesday night’s presidential debate.
The journey of the viral claim from vague, third hand gossip among Ohio neighbors to the presidential debate stage —
where it was broadcast to 67 million people — is as stunning as the claim itself, according to those who started it all.
NewsGuard identified and tracked down the two people central to the claim: Erika Lee, the Springfield resident who wrote the original Facebook post, and Kimberly Newton, the neighbor who had provided her with a third-hand account of the rumor, making Lee’s social media post a fourth-hand account: the alleged acquaintance/cat owner; Newton’s friend; Newton; and Lee, who posted it on Facebook.
In exclusive interviews, NewsGuard spoke both with Lee, a 35-year-old hardware store worker who has lived in Springfield for four years, and Newton, her neighbor and a 12-year resident of Springfield. The interviews reveal just how
flimsy and unsubstantiated the rumor was from the beginning — based entirely on third hand hearsay. Yet it quickly gained traction and, remarkably, found its way to Trump’s lips on a national stage.
“I’m not sure I’m the most credible source because
I don’t actually know the person who lost the cat,” Newton said about the rumor she had passed on to her neighbor, Lee, the Facebook poster. Newton explained to NewsGuard that
the cat owner was “an acquaintance of a friend” and that she heard about the supposed incident from that friend, who, in turn, learned about it from “a source that she had.” Newton added: “I don’t have any proof.”
That adds up to three people with no firsthand knowledge of the allegedly victimized cat: Newton’s “friend,” Newton, and then her neighbor Lee. Or perhaps it’s four people if we count the “source” that Newton says her “friend” relied on.
Lee’s since-deleted Facebook post first appeared in a private Springfield Facebook group called “Springfield Ohio Crime and Information” earlier this month (Lee could not recall the exact date). The post said: “My neighbor [Newton] informed me that her daughters [sic] friend had lost her cat. … One day she came home from work, as soon as she stepped out of her car, looked towards a neighbors house, where Haitians live, & saw her cat hanging from a branch, like you’d do a deer for butchering, & they were carving it up to eat.”
(However, Newton told NewsGuard that the connection to the acquaintance was not through her daughter.)
The claim jumped from Facebook to X on Sept. 5, when a conservative user named @BuckeyeGirrl posted a screenshot of Lee’s post, with Lee’s name redacted.
On Sept. 9, city officials said they had no evidence of pets being stolen, injured, or eaten by the immigrant population in Springfield. In an emailed statement to NewsGuard, a city official said: “In response to recent rumors alleging criminal activity by the immigrant population in our city, we wish to clarify that there have been no credible reports or specific claims of pets being harmed, injured, or abused by individuals within the immigrant community.”
Nonetheless, on Sept. 10, the story reached the national stage. “In Springfield, they're eating the dogs. The people that came in, they're eating the cats. They're eating the pets of the people that live there,” Trump declared as fact during the debate. (He was fact-checked in real-time by debate co-moderator David Muir of ABC News.)
Lee, who described herself to NewsGuard as a Democrat who supports Donald Trump, told us that
she was “shocked” to see Trump repeat the claim that she had made in a private Facebook group. "Honestly, it blew me away,” Lee said. “I didn't think that any of this would explode to the presidency.”
Despite extensive news coverage debunking the pet claims that she helped propel into the national discourse with a Facebook post, Lee said that she has not followed the story closely. “Actually, I haven’t really been following the news much on it at all,” she said. “I’ve only really seen it like on Facebook, what things pop up on my news feed, or what other people have shared on things that they have read up on.”
As for how the story has shed a negative light on the thousands of Haitian migrants who have settled in Springfield, Lee said she was “just trying to inform people, you know, again, not saying Haitians as a whole [are] bad.”
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"It is great to be a blonde. With low expectations it's very easy to surprise people."
Pamela Anderson
