A day or two ago I started getting messages from a few Facebook friends about a ‘hidden story.’ The messages mentioned that Mayor Bloomberg had said during a press conference that looters would be sent to internment camps in upper New York. With the state of anxiety in the world, the general distrust of authority figures, I could see where this information would be believable, but what got me curious was that I had heard nothing about this in the media.

Earlier in the week I had been told about protests at the White House and how this was being hidden by the media. Well, not really since I had heard about the pipeline protests on a number of liberal talk shows the week before, saw articles written in major magazines and news reports. The protests had been planned months in advanced and it might have been an under the radar story to some, but the buzz about it was clearly there for those who did a simple Google search. With the arrest of Darryl Hanna, the protest became more ‘mainstream.’

It seems when people have a cause, a belief they feel should be brought to the masses, there is a love-hate relationship with the press. They claim there is no coverage of their cause, explaining that the mainstream press is suppressing their voices, yet there are many ways of getting information to the press. Saying things are hidden is more difficult with the internet, not impossible to hide but with bathrobe reporters, bloggers and others the information can get out there for anyone to see.

However, that is the exact problem faced in getting facts on a story. There can be so many people so caught up in a cause that they pass on the same information, link to the same source and it can seem there is overwhelming proof of a story when all you have is one or two sources being passes along by a multitude of bloggers. Unfortunately this has been the case in the Bloomberg story.

My first clue was seeing the story was supposedly in Weekly World News. This is the same tabloid that has various sightings of Batboy, so I was immediately skeptical. Now, tabloids can break important stories, just ask John Edwards and a host of celebrities, but it has to be said their track record is spotty. When I did a search on Google on the story, my skeptics rose again. Yes, there were many bloggers passing on the story, but their source material was either Weekly World News or a link on Yahoo which was a dead link. Now, a few weeks ago when FoxNews website NewsNation posted a distorted article about the President’s Birthday party, I took screenshots of the page. Why, because I figured if the uproar was bad enough they might alter the page. I wanted proof it was there. I did the same thing earlier when the pledge being signed by some of the Republican candidates talked about how slaves had more stable families than blacks today. Soon after the story broke nationally the page was altered. So if anyone has questions if it was true that was on the page, I have the proof it was there.

For whatever reason, a simple screenshot of the Yahoo page wasn’t done by any blogger I have found.
Another thing striking me as odd was the story goes that he said this at a press conference. Considering the press conferences going on during the hurricane, there was print and TV media at those event. Surely the press pool must have had this broadcast and someone posted it on YouTube. There were no postings about Bloomberg talking about internment camps other than this woman called The Truther Girl. I will reserve my thoughts about her but she states in her video post she saw in Yahoo news about what Bloomberg said and had it on screen but she moved the camera so fast from the screen I have to say I have my doubts, considering that and other things she said.

After that I went to the source, Weekly World News. This is where the story totally falls apart. According to the Weekly World News article, Ron Kuby, a famed attorney, was arrested and sent to upstate New York. Ron Kuby is a radio talk show host and lawyer. If he was indeed arrested and sent to upper New York to one of the internment camps, he would have made a royal stink about it. Nothing on searches about him being arrested, nothing about him saying anything on his radio show. Much like the lawyer who is doing a protest at the White House, if this had happened to Kuby, he would have been shouting about it and truthfully, Kuby has a better reputation with the New York press corp that the lawyer in Washington, so he would have gotten the information out either by the press or by himself and the radio show.

Supposedly this was part of the statement the Mayor made about elevator riders during the storm.
Mayor Bloomberg also had dire warnings for people riding elevators during the storm. 

“If you get into an elevator during the storm, we will get you out, but you will be sent to an internment camp.”  Bloomberg said that the government can no longer tolerate citizens who do not do exactly what the government tells them to do.   “New York City is no place for rebels.  If you want to defy our orders, you will be sent to a camp. “

According to the article, Gov. Cuomo also signed off on the internment camp issue. Now I know some may feel there is a grand conspiracy out there, and I’m not saying there isn’t but think for just a moment, how would the Mayor of New York set up internment camps in upper New York. He’s the Mayor, not a Gov. If this was signed off by the governor, no intrepid reporter has tracked this down? Reporters can find John Edwards love child, can catch Lindsay Lohan drinking, can find hidden government bills but they can’t produce a video of a press conference where Bloomberg made these statements?

Another kicker to the questioning of the article was mention of a Daily News reporter called John Quimby. From what I can find, there is no reporter named John Quimby for the Daily News. No bylines come up, no articles from him on the web other than those bloggers who linked to the same Weekly World News article where he is mentioned.

What I find so remarkable about wildfire stories like the one about Bloomberg is how easily it is to show them to be false but people are willing to believe them because they fit into their worldview narrative. The talk of internment camps, the Obama administration doing bad and other code words make the article, in the mind of people of the mindset, believe them, yet if there is something that doesn’t fit their worldview they will research to death to find information to prove the information flawed.

It might seem my goal is to belittle people who fall for this, and that wouldn’t be the case. Like I said, I’m open to have doubt about the government. I’m having problems with the whole magic bullet thing, but you can’t go believing everything blindly that fits with your impression of the world. You have to be a healthy skeptic in these issues. Think about this for a moment, and I saw this on a TV show a long time ago. In elections it has been known for political operatives to put out false or misleading information to taint the opposition candidate. It can be used to discredit the candidate later and as much as the protest goes, the public will believe the lie rather than the truth. Remember the Bush/Kerry election when we were bombarded with ‘he voted for the war before he voted against it’ and the Swift boat stuff? If I wanted to discredit someone I might put out false information for them to print and pass out, so if later they stumbled on something legitimate, the error articles could be brought out to discredit them.

Just saying it might happen, not that it does.