MEDIA WINNER: Philip Bump
Philip Bump with the Washington Post watched conservative filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza’s 2020 “election fraud” film 2000 Mules and offered a fact check for viewers. The film tries to convince audiences there was nationwide conspiracy to steal the election from former President Donald Trump. D’Souza touts it as making an irrefutable case. Trump's rave reviews say it shows ballot boxes were "stuffed like never before.” According to Bump, the film relies on flawed cell phone geolocation technology, asking viewers to take leaps of faith and using hyperbole to spin a wide web. Central to 2000 Mules’ message is that phone-tracking can be used to retrace the steps of individuals. The technology was displayed in a scene where it was implied it had been used to solve a homicide in Atlanta. It was not. After D’Souza shows how the tracking technology works, he claims to highlight people who were used as “mules” to traffic fraudulent ballots moved from one place to another and were tracked. Their final stops were ballot drop boxes in battleground states. Bump wrote after watching the film that the geotracking info — which is the "crux' of the film's claims — is being presented in a way that's "wildly misleading." "In other words," Bump writes, "D’Souza is elevating shaky, misrepresented, incomplete claims to bolster his rhetoric." "There’s huge demand for proving that Trump didn’t lose in 2020, and this film provides just enough of a veneer of authority to let people collapse comfortably into that belief," he adds. Watching the film so we don't have to is a service. Soberly fact-checking it is practically a bonus. |