As the Republican Party quickly tries to come up with a plan to discredit the allegations of attempted rape of Christine Blasey Ford by Brett Kavanaugh, their right-wing propaganda machine has been in full gear. Business Insider reports that Fox’s Laura Ingraham, the Drudge Report, and right-wing radio host Mark Levin have all deleted social-media posts attacking Christine Ford for being a bad teacher.
Why? After a conservative outlet, Grabien News, published a story about Christine Ford and her negative ratings on the subjective website RateMyProfessors.com, these other right-wing hacks retweeted the story.
"Christine Ford is the worst educator I have experienced," one former student wrote anonymously on the website. "Something's wrong with her," wrote another.
However, it turns out Christine A. Ford, the person they were attacking, is a former instructor in the social work department at California State University, Fullerton. The Christine B. Ford they wanted to attack is a professor of clinical psychology at Palo Alto University. So, you see, they’re both in California.
Grabien News left the story up, text struck through, with an editor’s note of apology.
We apologize for the error, but we've since learned there are two Christine Fords working in clinical psychology in California and we wrote this report about the wrong Christine Ford. We regret not going to greater lengths to ensure this was indeed the same Christine Ford. Please do not share this article with anyone (and if you have, delete it/withdraw it); we are only leaving the page up so you can see this important update.
The issue here isn’t the mistake. It’s a dumb bad mistake, but it’s not surprising. In the rush to get out news, mistakes are made, sloppy “journalism” happens. The real issue here is that this story was simply put out as a character-assassination attempt against a woman who alleges she was almost raped by the man who is set to become our next Supreme Court justice. The ONLY possible thing that would have made this a newsworthy story would have been if every student review had included some comment about how this teacher continuously talked about falsely accusing people of sexual assault. And even if that were the case, one would have to find out who these commenters were.
Grabien News, which carried the pathetic story in the first place, at least apologized for its mistake. Laura Ingraham, Drudge, and Mark Levin are peddling bullshit, and pretending they didn’t just push rape-victim-blaming lies out to their millions of followers.