I read an opinion piece on Stuff yesterday (24/4/2020) that was a typical anti-Trump complete with the writer’s own emotional biography on points. Being critical of Trump is fine and a different thing from an implacable bias of Trump is wrong on everything.
As has been pointed out in the Spectator online today there is a difference between taking Trump literally as opposed to taking seriously. It has been said that 'supporters take him seriously but not literally’ as they can see the "tradie" like humour and ironical bathos: The MSM 'media take him literally' and each word fundamentally, because ideologically they are puritan like fundamentalists in a word game that has become detached from practical reality. But they do not take him seriously.
The article was from the Philadelphia Inquirer. It has a circulation of about 150,000. That might equate with a free give away suburban paper for Wellington. So first off Stuff hunted down or were fed and viscerally accepted an article from a marginal paper without seeing whether the source was mainstream or authoritative.
Then we note that in terms of media watch sites (less than 2 minutes to look up via Google) that the Philadelphia Inquirer. is considered left, biased and with a strong progressive agenda. In 2012 the Philadelphia Inquirer was bought by the then governor, a Democrat with DNC roles. There was concern at the time of the purchases over bias and political control of a media outlet.
It seems Stuff has in its undergraduate student union mindset a woeful editorial competence in discriminating between news and political bias or is merely blindly feeding off a biased agenda? I check the source of articles that appear in Stuff and the main US feeders are the New York Times, The Washington Post, Huffington Post and CNN and MSNBC. On the whole, but not invariably, there are some lone voices, the New York Times and the Washington post push a strong anti-trump narrative and thus Democrat line. CNN’s ratings have fallen through the floor and Elon Musk recently questioned how it is that it is still going, This link https://townhall.com/columnist... might explain that. On never sees a reference to The Hill, the National Review or other Washington med. Breitbart is always castigated as far-right but nevertheless it catches some interesting news articles irrespective of its right-leaning slant, which a discriminating reader can note and deal with. Its former editor in chief in London, Raheem Kassam, is a man of penetrating intellect and acted as a counterpoise to MSM narrative. The loathsome danger is in the word ‘intellect’ to which one could add curiosity. The epigraph to chapter 21 of George Elliot’s brilliant Daniel Deronda on the power of ignorance is worth reflecting on in this regard
Most New Zealanders opinion of Trump come from our media. If you avidly follow US news across many sources and are aware of American history a differing picture of the man evolves and that of the tradition he sits in. A former ACT MP has told me is simply ‘vile.’. I would have thought there was a political meeting of opinion between the two. But he is judged, as is Dotcom, not on his rights and entitlement to justice, but on whether we like somebody- as one of us in the beltway club- and whether we would or not have them to dinner is hardly a test of practically-minded thinking people. Because of that emotional repugnance a person may lose their status and rights? The example that comes to mind is today’s story of a Democrat house of representatives member, Karen Whitsett, who thanked Trump for allowing chloroquine, which she says has saved her life. She is now being censured by her party:
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/...
Giving credit where credit is due is what decent people do. Was it better for her to die? This is the madness and corrupting effect of unbalanced bias. It does not lead to truth and problem-solving.
The implacable and indiscriminate political rejection of whatever Trump says and does is errant as political folly. As the Spectator on 18 March 2020 noted in regard to WHO “..but it’s useful in politics to remember: just because Trump says something, it does not make it wrong.” The closing of the US border to flights from China was right for which the President was pilloried for being racist. Howling at the “moons” within the hermetically sealed labyrinths of underground woke ideas and labels of identity politics, which the MSM media has bought into, is not a means to resolve the present Covid-19 crisis or any situation.
As the emperor Tiberius said 'don’t like me: like what I do.'