Media malpractice a malicious malady

Not so long ago, the establishment media were the trusted truth-tellers tirelessly working on behalf of the American people. They parsed the rhetoric, vetted the principals and extracted fact from spin to deliver the real story to the public they served, in time for the morning paper or the evening newscast.

Those were the days.

Today, all too often, media institutions are used as propaganda blowtorches, spewing fantastical, bombastic pablum at the masses, all in the cause of taking down President Trump.

Sometimes, it is done loudly, with bombshell allegations, as was the case in September when the New York Times ran a story about President Trump’s Supreme Court pick, Justice Brett Kavanaugh. The piece contended that a Kavanaugh classmate at Yale saw “Mr. Kavanaugh with his pants down at a different drunken dorm party, where friends pushed his penis into the hand of a female student.”

What the Times omitted was that the alleged victim of the incident had no recollection of such an event and that the supposed eyewitness was a Clinton ally who’d worked for Bill in the 1990s. Kavanaugh spent much of that decade working for Ken Starr as an investigator contributing to the Starr report that would eventually lead to Clinton’s impeachment.

The Times — which touts the motto “All the news that’s fit to print” — apparently found these details unfit.

Sometimes media malpractice is committed more craftily, subtly.

That was in evidence this week in the wake of the death of Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Al-Baghdadi founded ISIS, a global terrorist group that made a sport of brutally torturing and murdering captives. Al-Baghdadi instituted a program in which women were systematically raped.

A headline in the Washington Post read, “Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, austere religious scholar at helm of Islamic State, dies at 48.”

You read that right.

Is it possible that the folks at the Post considered Al-Baghdadi first and foremost an “austere religious scholar”? Or was it so hard for the Post to give credit to President Trump for killing a terrorist kingpin that they had to soften the image of the fallen terrorist to temper the positive reception the American people would have to it?

Though the headline was changed, the  Post felt no pressing need to expend too much energy on an explanation. WaPo spokeswoman Kristine Coratti Kelly tweeted “Regarding our al-Baghdadi obituary, the headline should never have read that way and we changed it quickly.”

There is no excuse for what the Washington Post did. None.

Thankfully, the social media universe rubbed their face in it, mocking the headline with other like-minded, hypothetical obituaries on Twitter. Among the best:

@cmjacobs76 — “Darth Vader, disabled single father of two, passes away. #WaPoDeathNotices”

@jason_howerton — “Satan, unorthodox faith leader known for pushing back against famous wine maker Jesus, dies at 14 billion.#WaPoDeathNotices”

Jokes aside, this is serious stuff. Week in and week out there are stories and social media posts put out into the universe that are inaccurate, incomplete, distorted and sometimes fabricated.

We must all be aware that many of the institutions delivering to us the news are on a war footing, determined to propagandize with ferocity until Trump is gone.

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/2PuHgtT