How fake news turned a small town upside down
The sealed nature of the case prevented any journalist from an exhaustive examination, and the accused and the victim’s families refused to speak to the mainstream media. During the weeks leading up to his appointment in August 2016 to lead Donald Trump’s campaign for president, Twin Falls was a daily topic of discussion on Bannon’s national radio show, where he called it "the beating heart" of all that the coming presidential election was about. Paredez said that the mobile video made clear what specifically had happened between the children, but that he couldn’t show it to the reporters who asked him about it, because doing so would have constituted criminal distribution of child pornography. Over the past decade and a half, as conflict spread across North Africa and the Middle East, Twin Falls started to resettle larger numbers of refugees with darker skin who follow an unfamiliar religion — two things that make it difficult to blend into a town that is 80% white. ON a Tuesday morning in June 2016, Nathan Brown, a reporter for The Times-News, the local paper in Twin Falls, Idaho, strolled into the office and cleared off a spot for his coffee cup amid the documents and notebooks piled on his desk.
- And through an article sharing arrangement with the Idaho Statesman in Boise, Idaho, Times-News articles are broadcast across the region.
- Kingsbury said that he couldn’t discuss it and that the police reports were sealed because minors were involved.
- Alex Riggins’ name doesn’t appear in the story, although he was interviewed twice by Dickerson.
- Like a lot of small newspapers, the Times-News owes some of its success to a knack for hiring ambitious young reporters fresh out of journalism school from around the country.
Stranahan eventually quit his job at Breitbart, which he said was being mismanaged in Bannon’s absence. He is now based in Washington, and hosts a drive-time FM radio show with Sputnik, a state-run Russian news outlet. Edwards handed each of them a small copy of the US Constitution and told them to do their jobs. A woman named Vicky Davis, her hair in a satiny white bob, stood up and proclaimed that Islam had declared jihad on America. The narrative they espouse — on blogs with names such as Jihad Watch — is that America, currently 1% Muslim, is under an Islamic invasion.
Most Read
Chief Kingsbury read from a statement while fumbling with a thicket of microphones piled onto the lectern by visiting reporters. In between exasperated breaths, he explained why he could not disclose the details of the incident but said that he could address some of the misinformation that was spreading online. As more time passed without a solid account of what happened in the laundry room, lurid rumours continued to surface online and came to dominate conversations in shops and at school events. And while the city council members did not have control over the case, the bloggers who wrote about it placed much of the blame on them. What happened in Twin Falls was sadly somewhat commonplace, but not in the way the activists believed. The local police department investigates sex crimes on a weekly basis, and, in about half a dozen of those that proceed to court each year, the victims and the accused are both minors.
A workaround was to contact the county prosecutor, Grant Loebs, with whom Riggins had a working relationship. The Fawnbrook case was sealed, so Loebs couldn’t give details about the incident. The details were corroborated by Twin Falls Police Chief Craig Kingsbury, who spoke before the city council. That night, the Times-News published its first story challenging the "false" news about the Fawnbrook case ("fake news article" was not yet in the common vernacular), an article that has since been cited in almost every article about the Fawnbrook case. ON JUNE 2, 2016, reporter Alex Riggins was seven months into a new job at the Twin Falls Times-News, a daily newspaper in Twin Falls, Idaho, when he heard a call go out over the scanner. It was the city’s dispatch office calling for police to respond to the report of a sexual assault involving minors at the Fawnbrook Apartments.
- In "Roadside Attraction", after getting payback on Granny Sweetkin, Stan, Dipper, Mabel, Candy, Grenda and Soos' next destination is at Upside Down Town.
- ON JUNE 2, 2016, reporter Alex Riggins was seven months into a new job at the Twin Falls Times-News, a daily newspaper in Twin Falls, Idaho, when he heard a call go out over the scanner.
- His first order of business was an article about a City Council meeting from the night before, which he hadn’t attended.
- Edwards handed each of them a small copy of the US Constitution and told them to do their jobs.
- Its population of about 45,000 nearly doubles each day as people travel there to work, primarily in the thriving agribusinesses.
- "We have been made aware of a situation," said the first speaker, an older man with a scraggly white beard who had hobbled up to the lectern.
Her story, "How Fake News Turned A Small Town Upside Down," has become something of a final word on the Fawnbrook case. Alex Riggins’ name doesn’t appear in the story, although he was interviewed twice by Dickerson. Looking back, I asked him if he would choose to act differently on that June day when he heard the call go out over the scanner. While Brown wrote articles that sorted out the truth about the Fawnbrook case, Christensen was publishing commentary that castigated the people who were spreading falsehoods. In our discussions, Stranahan struck me as passionate about his stories; not about their veracity but about the freedom he and the critics of refugee resettlement should have to speculate as they wanted without being belittled by the fact-mongering mainstream. And he often referred to a Syrian refugee crisis, though no Syrians were ever resettled there.
Reading 10: Fake News, Anonymity
When stuntman Eddie Braun launched himself by rocket over the Snake River Canyon, in September 2016, reporting by the Times-News was picked up by national news outlets like NBC. And through an article sharing arrangement with the Idaho Statesman in Boise, Idaho, Times-News articles are broadcast across the region. His first order of business was an article about a city council meeting from the night before, which he hadn’t attended. Bannon latched onto the Fawnbrook case and used his influence to expand its reach.
The details of the Fawnbrook case, as it became known, were still unclear to Brown, but he was skeptical of what he was reading. Because most governing in Twin Falls is done by a city manager, these meetings tend to deal with trivial subjects such as lawn-watering and potholes, but Brown could tell immediately this one was different. She writes about her time working for the site Gawker.com, how she embraced making personal facts public, and the impact this had on her. In "Roadside Attraction", after getting payback on Granny Sweetkin, Stan, Dipper, Mabel, Candy, Grenda and Soos' next destination is at Upside Down Town. After Dipper flirts with Emma Sue to get her phone number and accidentally gets Candy to develop a crush on him, Stan and Soos turn the attraction right-side up and leave in a hurry.
A commenter on another website called The Muslim Issue posted the phone numbers and email addresses for the town’s government officials, the head of the refugee-resettlement centre, and some administrators at the college, which runs the refugee resettlement programme. But that night, the auditorium filled until there was standing room only, and television news crews appeared from Boise and other nearby cities.