For a good laugh in the morning, read the Washington Post.
Case in point, this hilarious article, just published yesterday:
LOL! Reading WaPo's take on the upcoming French election, one would think that Jean-Luc Mélenchon is Atilla the Hun.
It is kind of amusing, come to think of it, how the same dynamic we had, here, in the U.S., is now playing in France.
Basically, the establishment, or the party of the status-quo (for lack of a better term) would rather, if it came to that, lose the election to the candidate on the right that they have been maligning as Satan incarnate (Donald Trump on our side of the Atlantic, or Marine Lepen, in France) than win with a "leftist", like Bernie Sanders in the U.S., or Jean-Luc Mélenchon, in France. (The headline on the WaPo article originally described Mélenchon incorrectly as a communist. It was changed to reflect that he is a "leftist.")
And the reason is plain: propaganda-wise, for the apostles of the status-quo, a victory of the far right (or of, say, someone of a sulfurous reputation, such as Donald Trump) is always easier to explain away and dismiss: the establishment can blame the defeat of their candidate on the racists (and/or the misogynists), I suppose.
If a "leftist" wins, well then, how are they going to spin that? "The Martians did it"?
Besides, the unspoken secret (known to all), here, is that, ideologically, the establishment (all the so-called "centrists") has always felt more at home with the far right than with the "leftists".
The Washington Post has become somewhat of a joke of late, especially since, in what, as FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting) put it, had to be some kind of a record, The Washington Post infamously ran 16 negative stories on Bernie Sanders in 16 hours (between roughly 10:20 PM EST Sunday, March 6, to 3:54 PM EST Monday, March 7—a window that includes the crucial Democratic debate in Flint, Michigan, and the next morning’s spin.)
ReplyDeleteEven Forbes has been getting on their case: Fake News' And How The Washington Post Rewrote Its Story On Russian Hacking Of The Power Grid.
In all candor, it may be fair to wonder, at this point in time, whether the slogan the paper just recently adopted, “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” might not actually be The Washington Post's mission statement (i.e. to kill Democracy in darkness) instead of the sober cautionary forewarning the saying is normally meant to stand for.
ReplyDeleteWhen patterns are broken,
new worlds emerge.
—Tuli Kupferberg