Carson’s Explanation for Stabbing Story Changes: The Media Is a Big Game of Telephone
Over the past few days, one of Ben Carson‘s stories from his youth has raised questions due to seeming changes and disparities that have been noted in his various retellings. Carson, who is no stranger to criticizing the media, offered an explanation that reporters were to blame because of how they “record in different ways.”
Carson speaks frequently of the rough upbringing he had before becoming an esteemed neurosurgeon. He has occasionally recalled how he once tried to stab someone with a knife, but that he found religion after he instead hit the boy’s belt buckle and the knife shattered.
In a report from The Daily Beast, Gideon Resnick noted how certain details have seen subtle yet noticeable changes with each recounting, such as whether the incident took place at school or home, what the argument was all about, and whether it was a pocket knife or a camping knife. The discrepancies of the encounter have turned up in Carson’s various accounts and autobiographies over the years, and he was asked about that in a recent interview with The Washington Post.
“For one thing, it happened 50 years ago — half a century ago,” Carson said. From there, he compared the media’s takes on his story to the children’s party game Telephone, where one person whispers a message into another’s ear, and see how it comes out different after that message is passed around the room:
For another thing, when people record what I’ve said, they record it in different ways. When you’ve got something from 50 years ago that’s told by many different people, it’s sort of like the party game where you whisper to people sitting in a circle. When it gets to the original person, it’s very different.
[h/t The Hill]
[Image via screengrab]
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