Media offer glimpses of bias, bigotry
A 2/24 Josh Feldman Mediaite item bore the banner, "Donald Trump embraces his demo: 'I love the poorly-educated!'"
Those who'd heard the full Trump quote, from the speech he'd given following his previous night's landslide victory in the Nevada caucus, knew that headline to be a scissored scrap of the candidate's actual words. And that calculated deceptiveness, worthy of Ted "Voter Violation" Cruz, played into the general media line that voters supporting Trump could properly be dismissed.
Feldman did include the entire quote in the piece, so the headline's intended misleading would be most effective for casual news browsers merely scanning headlines and prejudiced against Trump. Of which there may be many.
"We won with highly educated, we won with poorly educated," Trump had actually told post-caucus victory party goers. "I love the poorly educated! We're the smartest people! We're the most loyal people!"
The counterfeit tactic of headlining a misrepresentingly clipped version of Trump's words, that readers might be deceitfully counseled, was also effected in a 2/24 Quartz website post. "'I love the poorly educated' -- read Donald Trump's full Nevada victory speech."
Like Feldman/Mediaite, Quartz did offer readers the unexpurgated quote. But it artfully contrived to fool with its stunt headline. Only by clicking past the fake tease and viewing the article itself could unwitting readers learn the context, the honest nature.
Mediaite and Quartz weren't alone in this dirty business. CNN, for instance, razored "I love the poorly educated" from the entire quote. The network used that calculated slice as the misleading headline above a video clip of the fuller event.
Other outlets leveraging the "poorly educated" angle included NBC, Yahoo, USA Today, the Washington Post, Gawker, Raw Story, Vox, Salon, and Esquire.
All of which recalls Trump's once castigating reporters as 'taking a half-sentence from here, and a quarter sentence from there' to wrongly convince readers.
The line that Trump voters are of a lesser intellectual class, and that that is just cause to dismiss them, is one much beloved by snooty establishment commentators. And for a time, 'Trump has elementary-grade vocabulary' essays were the rage.
Pompous pontificators' eager employ of the 'Trump backers our inferiors' slur evidences an educational elitism no less despicable than racial bigotry. And it betrays in-the-marrow disdain for the democratic ideal of equality.
Will such finger-wagging brayers of intolerance next propose literacy tests?
Americans of all educational levels, to paraphrase Capra, do the living and dying in this nation. And we have no less right than any of our fellows to help chart government's course.
We heal the ill, and we mop the floors. We fix the televisions, and we design the technology. We build the homes, and we drive the buses.
We are police, teachers, firemen, store clerks, farm workers, mechanics, pilots, waiters, and a million other real-world citizen types.
Electoral participation and the holding of opinions about our country are and should be equally open to all citizens -- regardless of which status they might hold or demographic group they might represent.
To suggest otherwise, to imply that a candidacy or popular movement is necessarily of less legitimacy because of educational or any other concern, is flatly anti-democratic.
It might seem a fetching notion, in a strange and terrible land made up only of identity-obsessed campuses, talcum-powdered editorial boardrooms, and sour-charactered political careerists. But America is not such a land.
A 2/24 Josh Feldman Mediaite item bore the banner, "Donald Trump embraces his demo: 'I love the poorly-educated!'"
Those who'd heard the full Trump quote, from the speech he'd given following his previous night's landslide victory in the Nevada caucus, knew that headline to be a scissored scrap of the candidate's actual words. And that calculated deceptiveness, worthy of Ted "Voter Violation" Cruz, played into the general media line that voters supporting Trump could properly be dismissed.
Feldman did include the entire quote in the piece, so the headline's intended misleading would be most effective for casual news browsers merely scanning headlines and prejudiced against Trump. Of which there may be many.
"We won with highly educated, we won with poorly educated," Trump had actually told post-caucus victory party goers. "I love the poorly educated! We're the smartest people! We're the most loyal people!"
The counterfeit tactic of headlining a misrepresentingly clipped version of Trump's words, that readers might be deceitfully counseled, was also effected in a 2/24 Quartz website post. "'I love the poorly educated' -- read Donald Trump's full Nevada victory speech."
Like Feldman/Mediaite, Quartz did offer readers the unexpurgated quote. But it artfully contrived to fool with its stunt headline. Only by clicking past the fake tease and viewing the article itself could unwitting readers learn the context, the honest nature.
Mediaite and Quartz weren't alone in this dirty business. CNN, for instance, razored "I love the poorly educated" from the entire quote. The network used that calculated slice as the misleading headline above a video clip of the fuller event.
Other outlets leveraging the "poorly educated" angle included NBC, Yahoo, USA Today, the Washington Post, Gawker, Raw Story, Vox, Salon, and Esquire.
All of which recalls Trump's once castigating reporters as 'taking a half-sentence from here, and a quarter sentence from there' to wrongly convince readers.
The line that Trump voters are of a lesser intellectual class, and that that is just cause to dismiss them, is one much beloved by snooty establishment commentators. And for a time, 'Trump has elementary-grade vocabulary' essays were the rage.
Pompous pontificators' eager employ of the 'Trump backers our inferiors' slur evidences an educational elitism no less despicable than racial bigotry. And it betrays in-the-marrow disdain for the democratic ideal of equality.
Will such finger-wagging brayers of intolerance next propose literacy tests?
Americans of all educational levels, to paraphrase Capra, do the living and dying in this nation. And we have no less right than any of our fellows to help chart government's course.
We heal the ill, and we mop the floors. We fix the televisions, and we design the technology. We build the homes, and we drive the buses.
We are police, teachers, firemen, store clerks, farm workers, mechanics, pilots, waiters, and a million other real-world citizen types.
Electoral participation and the holding of opinions about our country are and should be equally open to all citizens -- regardless of which status they might hold or demographic group they might represent.
To suggest otherwise, to imply that a candidacy or popular movement is necessarily of less legitimacy because of educational or any other concern, is flatly anti-democratic.
It might seem a fetching notion, in a strange and terrible land made up only of identity-obsessed campuses, talcum-powdered editorial boardrooms, and sour-charactered political careerists. But America is not such a land.
posted by DC Larson at
February 24, 2016
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