Topic: NewsBusters
Media Research Center blogger P.J. Gladnick declares in an April 27 NewsBusters post:
Have you noticed how the mainstream media has recently mocked the notion that leftwing protesters are being paid? The idea is ridiculous they claim and only Trump and his supporters are making that silly charge. Well, guess what? A pair of leftwingers have confirmed in the April 26 Washington Post that protesters are indeed paid.
Except, well, that didn't happen at all.
At no point in the Post column Gladnick is referencing do authors Leo Gertner and Moshe Marvit state that anti-Trump protesters are being paid. They do argue that even if some protesters were paid, doing so would not necessarily delegitimize the movement for which the protests are taking place.
Gertner and Marvit noted the example of Rosa Parks, who had been involved in the civil rights movement for years and was trained in resistance tactics prior to her refusal to give up a bus seat to a white person, asking whether Parks' protest would be "worth less" if she was thought of as a paid protester. Gladnick curiously omits that example from the excerpt of the column he includes in his post (which, again, never backs up Gladnick's claim that protesters are paid).
Gladnick includes in his post an alleged screenshot of a Craigslist ad seeking paid protesters. Fox News wrote about it last November but, crucially, apparently never verified the legitimacy of the ads -- it only notes that groups allegedly linked to the ads "have not returned phone calls seeking comment" -- or if anyone was ever, in fact, paid for protesting.
You'd think that given how purportedly rampant pay-for-protest is, Gladnick would be able to easily find someone who got paid instead of having to extrapolate conjecture from an op-ed and pretend that it's definitive proof.
