Nearly 350
newspapers around the United States took part in a massive group protest of
President Trump on August 16th by publishing Trump-bashing
editorials comically purporting to defend free speech and freedom of the press.
This, they claimed, was in response to Trump lambasting “fake news” and calling
the press “the enemy of the people.” Yet, they themselves have been attacking
Trump since the day he took office, rigorously hiding anything that reflects
positively on him while endlessly savaging him for things he may or may not
have done years before he took office. And everything he’s done since then. And
for any other slight, real or imagined. And for his diet, weight, hair, etc.,
etc., ad infinitum.
The
Boston Globe was the instigator of this mass tantrum, coercively encouraging
every newspaper in the land to participate in this colossal exercise in
group-think ironically disguised as a defense of their First Amendment rights. One
major metropolitan paper, however, stood tall, choosing to exhibit its
independence by deciding not to participate. Here is how it announced its
decision: “The
Los Angeles Times, however, has decided not to participate. There will be no
free press editorial on our page today.”
The
editorial continued: “This is not because we don’t believe that President Trump
has been engaged in a cynical, demagogic and unfair assault on our industry. He
has, and we have written about it on numerous occasions. As early as April 2017, we wrote this as part of a full-page editorial on
‘Trump’s War on Journalism’: ‘Trump’s strategy is pretty clear: By branding
reporters as liars, he apparently hopes to discredit, disrupt or bully into
silence anyone who challenges his version of reality. By undermining trust in
news organizations and delegitimizing journalism and muddling the facts so that
Americans no longer know who to believe, he can deny and distract and help push
his administration’s far-fetched storyline.’ We still believe that.
Nevertheless, the editorial board decided not to write about the subject on
this particular Thursday because we cherish our independence.”
The
Monty Python Troupe couldn’t have written better satire, although theirs would
have been intentional. The Times just wrote extensively about precisely what it
said it wasn’t going to write about. And then it sniffed: “The Los Angeles
Times editorial board does not speak for the New York Times or for the Boston
Globe or the Chicago Tribune or the Denver Post. We share certain opinions with
those newspapers; we disagree on other things. Even when we do agree with
another editorial page — on the death penalty or climate change or war in
Afghanistan, say — we reach our own
decisions and positions after careful consultation and deliberation among
ourselves, and then we write our own editorials. We would not want to leave the
impression that we take our lead from others, or that we engage in groupthink.”
(Emphases mine). Of course not. Perish the thought.
The Times
then went on to say that the president treats the media as a cabal, referenced
his “enemies of the people” remark, and mocked him for believing that “we’re in
cahoots to do damage to the country.” It closed by stating: “We mean no
disrespect to those who have decided to write on this important subject today.
But we will continue to write about the issue on our own schedule.”
You’ve got
to hand it to the L.A. Times. It managed to write about what it said it
wouldn’t write about that day,
referenced all the times it wrote about the subject in the past, and promised
to write more about it in the future, all-the-while touting its extraordinary
independence and inability to be influenced by its fellow newspapers.
Remarkably,
it took advantage of an opportunity that others of its ilk used for
virtue-signaling, did likewise, and then virtue-signaled again by saying it wouldn’t
take part in the mass virtue-signaling like its common, garden-variety peers.
Fake news?
Real comedy.
Brilliant
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