COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY JONATHAN FREEDLAND IN THE
GUARDIAN
"Donald Trump’s treatment of a crying baby reveals his
total lack of empathy"
It would be refreshing if even once Jonathan Freedland made
an effort to be fair and objective, but I'm pretty sure that is unlikely ever
to happen.
His job appears to be to scour the wire services for any
trivial point - such as a baby's crying in a speech - on which he can pounce to
make his own sweepingly negative point, as here .
It in fact is a practice which borders on the ridiculous if
you come upon it expecting to read real fact and analysis or even good
argument.
However, it is a practice well known to the arts of
propaganda.
The essence of pieces like this is that a highly charged
negative headline gets to appear on the main page, serving much to the effect
of a billboards along a highway. Many passing readers will glance at the
billboards, registering their negative messages.
In a sense, they are not even meant to be read - although
they are always competently written by the norms of grammar and creative prose
- because they serve merely as anchors for the billboards.
And The Guardian makes sure there are plenty of those
billboards with its stable of Freedland-like writers.
Please, is it too much to ever discuss real issues, real
events hanging in the balance of this election?
Apparently, it is.
____________________
Response to another reader's comment:
Mrs Obama very much did on several occasions.
I recall seeing her a few years back, pacing back and forth
in front of a gathering, rather menacingly barking out the fact "She
doesn't DO that" about some trivial matter. It was extremely unpleasant.
But the good folks working full time to bring down Trump
seem to be completely oblivious to historical facts which point towards someone
other than their target.
Just as we had a few years ago Hillary insulting a Gold Star
mother from the Benghazi fiasco, publicly calling her a liar. Imagine a public
official - which she was at the time - speaking that way about a citizen?
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2016/07/31/have-we-forgotten-that-hillary-pretty-much-called-a-gold-star-mother-a-liar-n2200420
