On Friday, the official White House account on X posted a video montage of what appeared to be drone strike footage mixed with several NFL highlights set to AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck.”
The video flipped back and forth between footage that read “UNCLASSIFIED” and a football player delivering a big hit. The caption read, “Touchdown.”
Two Ravens Hall of Famers made the cut.
The second clip used was a punishing hit by Ray Lewis and the next showed Ed Reed. By Sunday evening, the clip — posted to stir emotion about the ongoing war in Iran — amassed 10 million views.
That’s when Reed responded, quote-tweeting Washington D.C.-based reporter Ben Jacobs and denouncing the video. “I do not approve this message,” Reed wrote.
Lewis has not made any public comments.
Earlier Friday, the White House posted a similar video using baseball highlights. That showed one home run after another, mainly clips of Barry Bonds and Alex Rodriguez. No Orioles players, past or present, were featured. “Pure American dominance,” was the caption.
Have a news tip? Contact Sam Cohn at scohn@baltsun.com, 410-332-6200 and x.com/samdcohn.x.com. Sam appears as a host on The Sun’s “Early Birds” podcast.
PakarPBN
A Private Blog Network (PBN) is a collection of websites that are controlled by a single individual or organization and used primarily to build backlinks to a “money site” in order to influence its ranking in search engines such as Google. The core idea behind a PBN is based on the importance of backlinks in Google’s ranking algorithm. Since Google views backlinks as signals of authority and trust, some website owners attempt to artificially create these signals through a controlled network of sites.
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The purpose of a PBN is to give the impression that the target website is naturally earning links from multiple independent sources. If done effectively, this can temporarily improve keyword rankings, increase organic visibility, and drive more traffic from search results.
