Washington Post Claims Song 'American Idiot' About Bush, There's Just One Little Problem
The Washington Post, an egregiously liberal news media outlet, has made a rather huge booboo recently, claiming the Green Day song “American Idiot” was about former President George W. Bush.
The Post got this little tidbit of information from an article that allegedly quoted Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong as saying the song was about Bush. However, the problem here is that the article in question was published on a satire site, thus meaning it was actually #fakenews.
It’s called “fact checking” people. Do it.
The Post cited the satirical article saying lead singer Billie Joe Armstrong had once declared that the hit song was about Bush. “The main reason we made Bush the ‘American Idiot’ is because he started the war,” Armstrong said (in the fake Clickhole article).
Clickhole, a spinoff of The Onion, writes funny stories that might seem real, but the site says they want to mislead “just enough” to go viral.
With President Trump’s trip to Britain on the horizon, the Post put out a piece headlined, “In honor of Trump visit, Brits launch campaign to lift ‘American Idiot’ to top of the charts.” The story, it’s kinda’ worked: The song is No. 1 on the U.K. Amazon chart.
The Post story has been changed, but one Twitterer captured its original form:
https://twitter.com/samthielman/status/1016683917544427520
It’s truly mind blowing that neither the author, the editorial staff, or anyone else over at the Post had a single clue what Clickhole was. How can you work in this industry, posting news on the Internet, and not be aware of these massive sites?
Talk about epic fail. Yikes.
After taking a number of hits on social media for the error, the publication released an “editor’s note” on the debacle:
“Editor’s note: A previous version of this report included information about the meaning of ‘American Idiot’ that was attributed to a Clickhole.com article. Clickhole.com is a satire site. The information has been removed from the story.” In the new version, there are no references to Bush at all.
Ironically, the lyrics to the song seem to be taking jabs at the mainstream media, not the former president. Take a look for yourself:
Don’t wanna be an American idiot
One nation controlled by the media
Information Age of hysteria
Advertisement - story continues belowIt’s calling out to idiot America
Seems to me it’s bashing the hysterical media for overreacting to every little thing happening in the world and chastising Americans for falling for the crap they see on the news every evening.
Hard to argue with those points, wouldn’t you agree? In fact, that message is probably even more relevant now than ever.
Source: The Daily Wire
