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Lying With Headlines
'Lying With Headlines' should be a special classification category in propaganda studies.
This one, from the Washington Post, is a great example:
Hong Kong police arrest activist Joshua Wong for wearing a mask as repression deepens
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Those 90% of the readers who only skim headlines and look at the pictures will now believe that the Hong Kong rabble rouser (and friend of the neocons) Joshua Wong was arrested for wearing a medical protection mask during the pandemic.
That is however far from the truth. As the South China Morning Post correctly headlines:
Hong Kong opposition activist Joshua Wong arrested over illegal assembly and anti-mask law:
Hong Kong opposition activist Joshua Wong Chi-fung was arrested on Thursday for allegedly taking part in an illegal assembly last year.
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Wong said police had also accused him of breaching the anti-mask law, which banned people from covering their faces during protests.
The laws under which Wong is accused were enacted in Hong Kong before China stepped in and amended the local constitution to tighten security legislation. The arrest has thereby nothing to do with the "deepening repression" the Washington Post alleges.
Manipulative headlines are usual for tabloids to increase their sensationalism. Serious papers should refrain from such annoying manipulations.
Posted by: juliania | Sep 25 2020 2:47 utc | 37 Trump simply had said in answer to a rather hostile question, “We will have to see what happens.” He doesn’t want to suggest that he will lose is all that I could see him saying. There’s nothing unConstitutional there; it’s simply Trump being Trump.
This is what Trump actually said:
“We’re going to have to see what happens,” he told a reporter during a news conference at the White House. “You know that I’ve been complaining very strongly about the ballots, and the ballots are a disaster.”
“I understand that, but people are rioting,” responded the reporter, Brian Karem of Playboy magazine, who repeated the question.
“Get rid of the ballots and you’ll have a very peaceful — there won’t be a transfer, frankly. There will be a continuation,” the president said. That was an apparent reference to mail-in ballots, which for months he has railed against, without evidence, as rife with fraud and likely to produce a delayed, tainted or outright illegitimate election result.
What Trump said could be interpreted two ways: 1) that if there are no mail-in ballots, there won’t be a problem because he’ll win, or 2) if you allow mail-in ballots, “there will be a continuation” – of his Presidency. In other words, he’s either not going to accept the election results or he’s going to win. He doesn’t allow for the sensible option that he might lose due to legitimate mail-in ballots and simply accept that.
The New York Times also references his previous statements on that issue:
Mr. Trump’s remarks are a continuation of a long series. During an interview with Fox News in July, Mr. Trump similarly demurred when pressed by the network’s anchor, Chris Wallace, to “give a direct answer” about whether he would accept the election results regardless of the outcome.
“I have to see,” Mr. Trump said. “No, I’m not going to just say yes. I’m not going to say no, and I didn’t last time, either,” he added, referring to his similar equivocation before the 2016 election, which he warned might be stolen from him.
Even after his election that year, Mr. Trump falsely insisted that he had lost the popular vote only because millions of immigrants ineligible to vote had cast ballots for his opponent, Hillary Clinton.
In this campaign, Mr. Trump has primed his supporters to believe his defeat is possible only through what he has called a “rigged” or “stolen” election. “The only way they can take this election away from us is if this is a rigged election,” Mr. Trump said last month during the Republican National Convention.
Mr. Trump has also long joked about retaining power beyond legal limits, making frequent mention of serving beyond January 2025, when the Constitution — which limits presidents to two terms — requires that he leave office.
In 2018, after China’s Communist Party announced the end of a two-term limit for its presidency, Mr. Trump said at a closed-door fund-raiser that China’s authoritarian leader, Xi Jinping, would be “president for life.”
“I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll have to give that a shot someday,” Mr. Trump said, to cheers from his supporters.
In July, Mr. Trump even floated the idea of delaying the November election — a suggestion that lacks legal authority — although he dropped the notion after Republicans criticized it.
Now you can sit there and just dismiss that as “Trump being Trump.” I disagree completely. “Trump being Trump” is precisely the problem. As I said before, he has nothing to lose by causing a Constitutional crisis. As long as his attorneys can produce some plausible legal reason for not giving up power – one that will have to be adjudicated in the courts, and, regardless of the court’s decision, does not subject him to a charge of treason or other Federal crime – he can’t lose. And if the result of a Constitutional crisis is major riots in the streets, a call for martial law will not be far behind – he was almost ready to do that just for the summer riots.
I don’t see him trying to impose dictatorial rule – there are too many people who would oppose that for their own agendas and it would leave him open to a charge of treason. As I’ve said before, I also don’t see anything resembling a true “civil war” resulting. But a major Constitutional crisis is most definitely in the cards. The question is what will shake out from that in the near future, either economically or in terms of further erosion of civil liberties.
Personally I don’t give a damn. The sooner the US government implodes into an outright fascism, where even the pretense of being “democratic” is dropped, the better.
Posted by: Richard Steven Hack | Sep 25 2020 7:04 utc | 46
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