The Washington Post misleads about Trump administration

Thomas Lifson:
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Propagandists and their cousins in the advertising business know that frequent "impressions" linking an idea or feeling attached to something else (a person, a product, a policy) cause the audience to automatically, unconsciously associate the two in members' own minds. That is the reason Coca-Cola has spent many billions of dollars on advertising that shows healthy, slim people alongside the Coca-Cola name or a container of the beverage.

It is one of the oldest and most disreputable tricks in the propaganda business to apply this technique to politicians. Find something that sounds or looks bad that has been that way for a long time, and suggest to the audience that it is something new that the current incumbent implemented.

Thanks to eagle-eyed Mike Brest, writing in the Daily Caller, we have a classic example of this technique in the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post:

The Washington Post published an article about the U.S. government choosing not to renew the passports of people born near the border, as they are skeptical that those people were actually born in the country. It's not until the ninth paragraph that the article begins to address that the policy began under the Bush administration and continued under Obama.

Everyone in the news business knows that a large portion of readers never make it nine paragraphs into a story. Many glance only at the headline and a subhead or two. Another big group reads the first few paragraphs. These two groups account for a big majority of newspaper readers, unless the topic in question is of highest concern – say, an epidemic breaking out locally.

So, for most readers, the message conveyed is that the current administration of Donald Trump is doing this on its own initiative.
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There is more.

I review the Post's homepage every day and I get the impression that 90 percent of the people working there hate the President and sit around every day thinking of ways to make him look bad.  This story supports that theory.

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