This meme is once again being resurrected, and is a great example of how fake news is generated. Taco Bell was NOT voted “Best Mexican restaurant.” This comes from a survey about brand equity, which lets companies see how their brand is doing with consumers.
▪️The original meme dates back to 2018, when news articles picked up on the annual Harris Poll results. This is a survey on brand identification, not some effort to discover the best restaurants. The 2018 link no longer works, but here’s the 2021 poll:
https://theharrispoll.com/briefs/the-harris-poll-announces-this-years-brands-of-the-year-2021/
▪️Respondents weren’t voting on their favorite Mexican restaurant, they were answering online questions about thousands of brands across hundreds of categories (i.e. cars, travel, insurance, tech, media, restaurants, etc.)
▪️In the Mexican restaurant category, there were only 6 options: Taco Bell, Chipotle, Moe's Southwest Grill, Qdoba, Baja Fresh & Del Taco. The chains were judged on three qualities: familiarity, quality & future consideration. Taco Bell prevailed, but Moe’s & Chipotle also won in recent years.
▪️Taco Bell was awarded “brand of the year” in the Mexican restaurant category, it was the first time it won the award in 30 years. The winner of the “burger restaurant” brand of the year category was Wendy’s, yet no one would equate that with “Wendy’s was voted best burger restaurant!”
▪️But media outlets saw an opportunity for click bait, and an easy “look how stupid Americans are” story. Some admitted it wasn’t really a vote of Best Mexican restaurant in the actual article, but since no one reads articles the headlines won, turned into memes, and fake news was born.
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/taco-bell-america-apos-no-192600054.html
▪️Far from this being an example of what happens “when you don’t vote”, it’s a pretty apt comparison. You’re forced to choose among a small number of options that you probably don’t really like, the winner gets undue recognition and is declared the representative of the entire country.
It’s funny to see the left use the same conspiratorial rhetoric as the right did a year ago regarding the jobs numbers being downwardly revised. So many on the right, who knew nothing of how the jobs numbers are calculated or why they revise them, were convinced the downward revisions were a conspiracy to help Biden win.
If people want to have a debate about the birth death model or the survey methods, ok, but that’s not what’s happening here. Most people are under the delusion that the BLS report is the govt reporting every job created and lost, and are thus easily swayed it’s rigged when it suits their political ends.
This is almost laughingly misleading, as it leaves out everything before the letter.
▪️After being repeatedly lampooned by the Smothers Brothers over Vietnam, Johnson finally had enough. One night at 3 am he called the head of CBS William Paley, demanding that he “get those bastards off my back.”
▪️Paley then asked the heads of CBS entertainment to get them to back off of LBJ. However, instead of backing off the Smothers Brothers doubled down, booking a folk musician performing “Waist Deep,” an anti-war song about a soldier being stuck in the mud while “the big fool says to push on,” clearly a dig at LBJ.
▪️At the last minute, CBS cut the song from the pre-taped show to the outrage of the Smothers. They continued to push the boundaries off and on for the rest of his presidency, with CBS sometimes cutting segments that they thought went too far. Basically, it was a soft form of censorship.
▪️It wasn’t until Johnson made his surprise announcement not to run in 1968 ...
