A functioning democracy needs the sunlight of a free and responsible press, which makes the fog of facile takes, insidious spin, and unethical journalism in our media landscape all the more maddening.
In this second edition of our “news” quiz, we’re again mixing a real shame-worthy headline from the past week with two we’ve made up. Can you sort the pretend (for now) from the propaganda-speak?
Why Trump has a point on dictatorship
Public perceptions of decisive leadership lend some credence to Trump’s suggestion that “a lot” of Americans might welcome a dictator.
Why Trump has a point on mail-in ballots
Public perceptions of slow vote-counting lend some credence to Trump’s mail-in ballot criticism.
Why Trump has a point on Smithsonian’s focus on ‘How Bad Slavery Was’
Public perceptions of racial shame lend some credence to Trump’s calls to celebrate the “brightness” of American history.
Click here for the answer.* The home of this week’s headline is once again The Washington Post’s editorial page, courtesy of columnist Jason Willick. (Other outlets will be called to task in quizzes to come, and not just because the Post has been making it a little too easy.)
Just to sort all the fact from fiction: though Willick defended only one of Trump’s above takes, all three reference things the president has actually said. Sigh.
Onward, Contrarians. Have suggestions for a headline, piece of photojournalism, or other media that could use calling out in quiz form? Feel free to drop them in the comments!
*Our link will take you to an archived version of the piece in question so as not to send traffic to the original site.
Yeah, i guessed the right one, and it isn't just the headline that is shame-worthy. It fails to acknowledge that people's perceptions cannot be separated from their expectations, which can be easily influenced by the rhetoric of politicians like DJT. Only a child believes that whoever was ahead first should have been the winner. Anyone who has lived through election returns knows how unpredictable the outcome is until all the votes are counted, just as anyone who's watched a horse race, or an Olympic race, knows that the winner can always be the one who comes from behind. Are Americans so dull and gullible that if a winning candidate comes from behind, we think there must be fraud? We've been doing this every four years for nearly 250 years! To me, this piece does not hold up to the slightest bit of analysis, and its implication that election returns dynamics must correspond to people's perceptions (i.e. expectations) or there is some real basis for suspecting fraud is both ridiculous and dangerous.
I read the column itself so I knew the answer. Oddly, although WAPO has slid rightwards for the past year or so, the vast majority of its readership remains staunchly liberal, or at least centrist. The MAGA commentariat at WAPO is generally trollish, commenting without any kind of analysis or evidence. It's usually just right-wing sound bytes.
WAPO has even stooped to heavily censoring comments, especially those that criticize Trump. It is now a vanishing shadow of what it once was.