About Face… Spin!

American Thinker: It’s always amusing to watch the pundits and spinners turn on a dime. It used to be harder before the internet made it easy to retrieve what they said in the past. This week, with a tsunami of developments, the spinning is at full force.

Spinning

Let’s start with the spinning of the news and how media poisons the well in favor of their loved ones.

A. In 2014 CNN honored a Der Spiegel writer, Claus Relotius as “Journalist of the Year”. He could be reliably counted on to flatter the readers’ anti-American biases, so he was a natural winner for the network. Unfortunately for him, he ran up against some Americans in Fergus Falls, Minnesota, who cared about the truth. They scoured his report on the town, interviewed the people he said he had and exposed him as an utter fraud. That persuaded his bosses to take a second look at the nonsense he had been peddling and they fired him for fabricating his accounts.

Claas Relotius “falsified articles on a grand scale and even invented characters”, Der Spiegel said.

Among the articles in question are major features that had been nominated for or won awards, the magazine added.

Relotius, 33, admitted deceiving readers in some 14 stories published in Der Spiegel, the magazine said.

In a statement on Wednesday, the German publication said it was working to establish the full extent of Relotius’ “fabrications” after a colleague who worked with him on a story raised suspicions about his reporting.

After initially denying the allegations, Relotius confessed last week to inventing entire passages of text in several instances, Der Spiegel says.

In some articles, he is said to have included individuals he had never met or spoken to, “telling their stories or quoting them”.

If you’re a creative writer who hates America and craves getting journalism awards for it, there’s now a job opening at Der Spiegel.

B. Of course, that’s not the only way to slant the news. You can do it more subtly. Take Tom Bevan’s comparison of the NY Post and NY Times reportage on the President’s lifting Russian sanctions:

If you want a perfect example of how screwed up the news business is, take a look at these two stories today on Russia sanctions, one from the New York Post and the other from the New York Times.

Tom Bevan‏Verified account @TomBevanRCP 1h1 hour ago

2. It’s all about emphasis. The NY Post wrote up a small 200-word blurb on the news, focusing on the new sanctions on hacking, and relegating the lifting of sanctions on Deripaska to a final, 25-word paragraph.

Tom Bevan‏Verified account @TomBevanRCP 1h1 hour ago

3. The NY Times went to the other extreme, writing 1,200 words almost exclusively about the lifting of sanctions on Deripaska w/ominous quotes from Dems implying this all fits into the Trump-Russia collusion narrative. [snip]

It’s the same story: the WH levied some new sanctions on Russia & lifted others. But because of the emphasis, the framing, and headlines, readers of the Post and the Times will come away believing two completely different things about the news — and you can’t blame them.

Unless you read both versions or seek out official documents and transcripts of matters, you do not understand what happened. This may explain why American opinion has become so polarized.

Fake news works tirelessly to glorify the left and denigrate the right in everything — including appearance and fashion to frame your views as Motus so devastatingly reveals.

About Faces

You can be sure that whatever the left praised Obama for they will criticize Trump for. Equally so, whatever policies they advocated for or against they will take the opposite view once Trump does what they advocated for.

A. General Mattis’ Retirement and Syria

To be sure, the general is in all respects an exemplary military officer. His leaving is nothing unusual, and reflects yet another policy disagreement with the President — this time over the decision to withdraw 2,000 troops from Syria.

Little was heard from the left when Obama fired Mattis without even calling him, nor was there any disagreement  from that quarter that I can recall when Obama purged the military officer corps.

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