First off on Wednesday I mentioned it was my niece's birthday. Then on Saturday was my brother's birthday. And now today is my mom's birthday to complete the trifecta of birthdays. In the pre-pandemic times we would usually get together on the weekend to celebrate all three at once.
Anyway, we all know about fake news. Typically we think fake news is just for spreading wild and wacky far-right conspiracy theories. But sadly liberals are also sometimes guilty of fake news, even if it is a little more subtle.
On Facebook, Dan Rather's "News and Guts" is the only news site left that I follow because they have a good track record about not posting fake news, but they let this Slate article slip through the cracks. I saw the provocative headline, "Trump People Were the Worst Restaurant Guests, Too" and opened it to read all the horrible things Trump staffers did to restaurant workers. Did they scream at them? Not tip? Make crazy demands?
But as I plowed through the turgid, overblown prose (this waiter must be an English major) I kept looking for something to justify the headline. And looking...and looking--
There's really nothing here. It's all sizzle and no steak to use a restaurant metaphor. OK, sure Stephen Miller bugged the waiter about where the caviar came from. But he left a tip of more than 20%. Wilbur Ross ordered the cheapest wine by the glass, but he left a tip of almost 15%, which is not great but it's not "the worst" either.
Paul Manafort came in under a fake name...but left a 25% tip.
Where are the atrocities the headline made me expect? Spoiler alert, there really aren't any. I don't like to whine about entitlement, but this sounds pretty entitled to me:
His fellow near-billionaire Gary Cohn, Trump’s first chief economic adviser, was a bigger spender who still couldn’t bring himself to tip more than 18 percent, though it’s possible this was retaliation for my failure to remove every pin bone from his turbot, which was one of the first I’d deboned. (They say the big perk of a blue-collar job is the ability to leave work at the workplace, but here I am years later still wondering why some obnoxious banker stiffed me $15 after I’d meticulously removed at least 96 percent of the bones in his fish.)
He ONLY left an 18% tip when I got almost all the bones out of his fish. So...even though you didn't quite do a great job you should have been rewarded with a huge tip, right? Uh-huh.
It turns out Trump staffers were not really that bad. They probably weren't as good as Obama's staffers but far from "the worst" either. I hate defending Trump people but this is a clear example of fake news, where someone let his political views bias him. Maybe he sold the article before writing it and struggled to find anything to justify it. Or someone at Slate came up with the headline to get people to read it.
Any way you slice it, this is an example of why you need to read articles instead of just the headlines because on both sides of the political divide, fake news is all over the place.
3 comments:
Capitalism pretty much assures that we cannot have nice things. Everything has to generate profit, which creates sensationalism among 24-hour news. I wish that there was less capitalism and more socialism in our country.
The media is always slanting stories. Overly dramatic headlines is one way. Another is that they often leave out an important fact that makes the story less interesting. Ratings are the priority followed by their political bias. We don't really have journalism any more. It's all opinions.
Maybe I'm not getting what you mean here, but the idea of a non-profit media sounds a bit scary to me. It would be a media controlled by the government and funded by tax dollars? People wouldn't be able to trust it.
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