Thread by @HoegLaw

This is a truly amazing article (and tweet) in its singular, inescapable mission to present erroneously or incomplete information.

Thankfully it will have limited effects because it's only going out to...9.2 million people.

Oh, we should talk about this. (thread)

https://twitter.com/NBCNews/status/1554304994672779265

Fortunately, the very author of this piece has given us instruction on how to "fight back against the modern smear campaign playbook."

https://twitter.com/kattenbarge/status/1554152794793431040?s=20&t=l8_A_HBKWviia8JliGI6gQ

So a Twitter thread (absent being able to wield the might of a brand like @NBCNews seems entirely appropriate.)

https://twitter.com/kattenbarge/status/1554153448857341953?s=20&t=l8_A_HBKWviia8JliGI6gQ

Let's start at the top. The tweet (and article) is premised around the fact that there is a new groundswell of support for Amber Head as evidenced by the trending of the #AmberHeardDeservesAnApology hashtag.

But even that hook is at least disingenuous by omission as the author herself was "observing" this "trend" many hours before publication. She arrived at her conclusion well before any given hashtag was "trending."

https://twitter.com/kattenbarge/status/1554148866454425600

The assertion is further complicated by the fact that the "trend" (such as it was), was artificially organized by Heard supporters the prior day.

https://twitter.com/purpleforamber/status/1553931550978342914?s=20&t=pfZxgVNtfwTOIsmh6YQ5Xw

While I think that's acceptable behavior, such an organized PR campaign is probably worth mentioning at more than the "passing mention" level to give the full flavor of the events.

(It's also unclear how this "marks a shift in attitude" given the genesis of the trend.)

But moving on to the next issue: The Daily Beast.

As you can probably tell from the above passage, NBC News hasn't read any of the documents, and instead has contented itself with reporting on other reporting.

The problem is that The Daily Beast report is itself rife with errors (as secondary sources sometimes are), and has been forced to correct at least some of the mistakes it made owing to a seeming unfamiliarity with what happened in trial here at virtually any level.

This itself is then further called into question as the author of The Daily Beast piece himself has gone online in a rather...eccentric defense of his work (even as it gets corrected -- and likely requires further correction).

https://twitter.com/MarlowNYC/status/1554203065477201923?s=20&t=7V_Lv4GemsQYImhuFFdIVA

...going so far as to imply that an actual practicing Virginia lawyer commenting the matter is...not real?

(Disclosure: I've regularly streamed and otherwise conversed with Rob of @LumberLaw.)

https://twitter.com/MarlowNYC/status/1554290826846638080?s=20&t=7V_Lv4GemsQYImhuFFdIVA

Now that's all fine as far as it goes, a bad source is simply that, but why not actually go directly to the source? Why depend on a secondary Internet "outlet" at all? Well, that goes back to the fact that they apparently don't trust @aburkhartlaw.

Disregarding the fact that there's no reason to believe that The Daily Beast isn't using Burkhart's publicly available repository itself, the last line is also disingenuous, as no matter how one might feel about her, she has been very open w/ comment.

(Disclosure: I have also streamed with Andrea, and it is worth noting that there appears to be no love lost between Andrea and the author, even though her intentions are made clear from her *press release*.)

So we now have an article based on a "marked shift" the author herself claims was existing before an artificial "trend" used as explanation for the existence of an article premised on documents she hasn't read sourced from a secondary party in the midst of material corrections.

Still with me? Well it doesn't get any better from there. There's hyperbole. (Since 2016, really?)

Intimation of illicit motivation.

Raw assertions absent evidence.

And a wild misconstruing of actual trending topic dynamics based on a small handful of self-selected tweets.

On this last point, it's important to realize a few things (that that the author already knows):

(i) It's tremendously easy to get a hashtag trending (a fact which both @TheEmilyDBaker and @LumberLaw know all too well).

At numbers like these, heck the readers of this thread could get #ShrimpFriedRice trending if they really wanted to. It wouldn't mean anything.

(ii) A trending tag is used both to back up whatever it supposedly represents and also to argue against it (which itself helps the label trend). Telling regular NBC News readers that it's trending status means folks back up its message is disingenuous at best.

Now that doesn't mean that there can't be a positive trend for Heard sentiment represented here, but it does mean that NBC News hasn't remotely made its case, and is taking advantage of a lack of understanding from folks off social media.

Now I don't know if that all counts as a "quick explainer", but hopefully it's a bit of help to those trying to sort signal from noise.

I'm really no fan of Johnny Depp, but even for relatively unimportant articles like this one, we should expect - we deserve - better reporting.