The Daily Mail Vs. The Slingshot Channel

YouTube is filled with a plethora of content that suggests various subject matter. One such YouTube channel that goes by the name of The Slingshot Channel goes ahead and discusses various weapons or mechanical structures and tests their efficiency. Recently however, The Daily Mail has come across a video on said channel that seems to depict Joerge Sprave (owner of the slingshot channel) go ahead and test a knife on a police vest that looked similar to the one worn by Officer Kieth Palmer whom had been fatally stabbed by terrorist Khalid Masood in West Minister. The Daily Mail’s outrage seems to stem from the fact that they believe Joerge Sprave is teaching terrorists how to attack police officers in a similar manner to how Kieth Palmer had been attacked and slain. The exact video had been previously deleted by Joerge Sprave due to the attacks and the community strike his channel had received but has since been resolved and is re-uploaded.

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Now if you’re a long time viewer of Joerge Sprave’s videos you can tell that this video was consistent with the rest of his content and was not anomalous at all. Even if you were a new viewer of the content, if you had taken a quick look at the hundreds of past videos on his channel it becomes clear that this is consistent with the pattern of other videos. Aside those more obvious holes to The Daily Mail’s aggressive assertions the biggest hole comes to play when you realize the video in question was made a solid seven months ago. This was just a regular video testing the standards of vests along with other things he’s tested efficiency for. The Daily Mail then makes the claim that because he’d monetized the video, that he’s now cashing in on this. I mean this is what the dude does for a living, outside of the accusations he makes ad revenue on every video. Joerge Sprave didn’t decide to magically one day think, “Ah this is going to be the one that I cash in on huehue.” In addition to that, The Daily Mail calls Joerge Sprave an expert on knives. It just gets worst and worst. Joerge Sprave never once claimed to be an expert on knives and truthfully the only reason he would look like an expert on anything to The Daily Mail is because they’ve never seen someone do more then 5 minutes of research before creating some content which includes the brilliant minds they hired to right the article in the first place.

Joerge Sprave in an effort to defend himself explains thoroughly that the video was created to show the cheapness of the material that created the vest. It wasn’t to show terrorists how to attack anyone seven months in advance, which mind you should be classified as a seriously dumb conspiracy theory and how it made it past a draft stage I’ll never know. He then further states that obviously military or police vests have are several times more powerful and have no correlation with what he was showing. He simply wanted to show the general public that many of these vests are cheap and weak. People carry knives in the streets and he wanted to show that wearing certain equipment might not hold up as you would think it does.

At the end of the day, this is just a blog post and I’m left hopeful because if all else fails I can always be a journalist because that apparently seems to require no skill.