Saturday 16 September 2017

POTUS bad


Hugh Sykes (r)

Having only just come back from a holiday in sunny Spain I thought that the best way to catch up with the news and see if I'd missed anything important was to click onto Twitter and see what the usual BBC suspects were saying. 

The big news yesterday it appears was that Donald Trump had tweeted something objectionable. Oh, and that there'd been another terrorist attack in London.

Apparently, the big news (the Trump tweet) was actually about the other story (the terrorist attack), but the Trump tweet was unquestionably the bigger news event for these BBC tweeters. They certainly weren't impressed with the U.S. president.

Here's Hugh Sykes, for example, representing all the others:


********

Meanwhile, over on the BBC website Anthony Zurcher was adding his 'analysis' to the BBC's main article about the Trump tweet. This went through several edits to tone down its opinionated nature. The title 'Changing the subject' gained a question mark (changing it from an assertion to a question), and the paragraph:
Besides his London remarks on Friday morning, the president again blasted Senate procedural rules, called for his Muslim travel ban to be "tougher", said the fight against the so-called Islamic State should be "nasty", and slammed ESPN, a US sports cable network, for being too political.
was a purged version of what had originally read: 
The president's twitter feed on Friday morning was peculiar, although not necessarily surprising. Besides his London remarks, he again blasted Senate procedural rules, called for his Muslim travel ban to be "tougher", said the fight against the so-called Islamic State should be "nasty", and slammed ESPN, a US sports cable network, for being too political.
Still even these edits didn't tone its opinionated tone down that much it must be said. His 'analysis' still reads like opinion throughout...

...as it usually does.

2 comments:

  1. Yesterday's 6 & 10pm News coverage of the Parsons Green bombing did precisely what your Tweeters did - it was clearly a deliberate deflection/distraction exercise. Didn't work though, did it?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Trump tweeted something objectionable: the truth.

    ReplyDelete

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