Wednesday, July 8, 2020

AT THE REQUEST OF OUR LOCAL AUTHORS AND JOURNALISM STUDENTS, PART 1

An opinion piece from the Wall Street Journal on our failing MAINSTREAM news media...it's a detailed article, properly citated, and should be read in its entirety at the link below.

The Press on Mount Rushmore By HOLMAN W. JENKINS, JR.

July 7, 2020 7:02 pm ET

Every American, regardless of how he or she feels about Donald Trump, should read his July 3 speech at Mount Rushmore and then the Washington Post account of the speech by Robert Costa and Philip Rucker. The Post account begins: “President Trump’s unyielding push to preserve Confederate symbols and the legacy of white domination, crystallized by his harsh denunciation of the racial justice movement Friday night at Mount Rushmore . . .”

Except that Mr. Trump made no reference to the Confederacy or any of its symbols. His only reference to the Civil War was to Abraham Lincoln and the abolition of slavery as a fulfillment of the American Revolution.

Sen. Tammy Duckworth, as many commentators on the right noted, also lied when she said Mr. Trump “spent all his time talking about dead traitors.” He mentioned not a single leader or champion of the Confederacy.

In its own account, though hardly friendly to Mr. Trump, the New York Times went out of its way to counter these rampant distortions, reporting that Mr. Trump “avoided references . . . to the symbols of the Confederacy that have been a target of many protests.”

A day later, when he unleashed his uninformed Twitter rant about Nascar’s misconstrued noose incident and an unexplained “flag” reference possibly related to its ban on Confederate symbols, the Times again noted of Mr. Trump’s holiday speech, “In that address he avoided specifically mentioning anything related to Confederate monuments.”

Which I’m guessing means that Trump-defending pundits aren’t the only ones troubled by the Rubicon we’ve crossed when mainstream press outlets and a U.S. senator flagrantly lie about the content of a presidential address.


READ THE REST AT https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-press-on-mount-rushmore-11594162964?mod=hp_opin_pos_2

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