Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller on Wednesday posted — and then deleted about five hours later — a doctored photo on Facebook that showed television personality Whoopi Goldberg wearing a shirt that depicts President Donald Trump shooting himself in the head.
The post was in response to ABC canceling the sitcom “Roseanne” after its lead actress referred to a former advisor to President Barack Obama as a product of the Muslim Brotherhood and the “Planet of the Apes.”
Miller wrote that he “in no way condone[d]” the language used by actress Roseanne Barr, but also asked ABC to consider canceling Goldberg’s show, “The View.” Miller alleged that she has “made similarly outrageous comments about President Donald J. Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, and others in the administration.”
“If proven true,” Miller wrote of the photo that had already been conclusively proven false by fact-checking websites, “Whoopi Goldberg’s wearing of a shirt depicting our President being shot in the head is grounds for immediate termination. At present, all I see is hypocrisy and double standards from ABC. As we say in the country ‘what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.’”
Goldberg previously showed her viewers the real picture, in which she’s at last year’s New York women’s march. The shirt read: “And you thought I was a nasty woman before? Buckle up, buttercup.” The photoshopped image made its rounds on the internet last year and was shared on Twitter by Barr Tuesday.
Todd Smith, Miller’s campaign spokesman, told the Austin American-Statesman that neither he nor Miller knew if the doctored photo was real before it was posted to Facebook.
“We post hundreds of things a week. We put stuff out there. We’re like Fox News. We report, we let people decide,” Smith told the Statesman.
Miller has a history of posting fake news to his Facebook feed. In December 2016, a Texas Tribune analysis of a portion of Miller’s social media history identified 10 postings of demonstrably false, misleading or unsupported information.
Source: Texas Tribune Blue Left News
