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How a single tweet hijacked the September jobs report coverage

Former General Electric CEO Jack Welch became the latest high-profile person to float a political conspiracy theory last week, joining the likes of Donald Trump

Former General Electric CEO Jack Welch became the latest high-profile person to float a political conspiracy theory last week, joining the likes of Donald Trump and Rush Limbaugh by suggesting that the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) had manipulated the September jobs data to help re-elect President Obama. While any sane person would assume that Welch's theory would fly outside the Overton Window, it quickly gained currency among many conservative  commentators and became a central topic of conversation on the Sunday talk show circuit.

 


On Monday's panel, Alex and her guests discussed this relatively recent phenomenon in which any fringe idea can quickly become a part of the mainstream political narrative and argued whether "epistemic closure" is more of a problem on the right than the left.