Same groups that ‘fact checked’ Obama’s gun control speech.
Rosa Parks was trending on Twitter Wednesday morning after numerous mainstream media outlets falsely reported that Ammon Bundy, leader of the Oregon refuge takeover, compared his group’s efforts to that of the civil rights icon.
“We are doing the same thing as Rosa Parks did. We are standing up against bad laws which dehumanize us and destroy our freedom,” a user tweeted early Wednesday under the Twitter handle @Ammon_Bundy.
MSNBC reporter Tony Dokoupil, reporting from Oregon, confirmed that the account is a fake and that Mr. Bundy is not on Twitter.
But that didn’t stop numerous major news outlets, including The Washington Post, Business Insider, USA Today and Time magazine, from crediting the real Mr. Bundy with the tweet.
“To be clear: Rosa Parks — the black woman who, on Dec. 1, 1955, refused to give her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Ala., to a white man — was protesting legally sanctioned discrimination. She was willing to be arrested — to serve time and expose an unjust system,” The Post reported. “Bundy, armed and possibly dangerous, takes a quite different position. He says his protest won’t ‘end until we get our public lands back,’ denying the federal government’s role in land management — a legally dubious position.”