Perhaps there is some cosmic almanac in which the universe’s greatest ironies are recorded, a heavy tome that the angels can skim, marveling at man’s ability to demonstrate his own insincerity. If there is, the celestial scribes have had a busy morning thanks to Donald Trump Jr.’s appearance on Fox News in which he lambasted the New York Times for kowtowing to its audience.
The subject at hand was the newspaper’s decision to change its planned front-page headline summarizing President Trump’s speech on Monday following twin mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton, Ohio. The paper originally ran with a headline of “Trump urges unity vs. racism,” a summary of Trump’s comments that manages to misrepresent both Trump’s vision of unity and his relationship with racism. It’s technically true, in the way that saying Babe Ruth hasn’t hit any home runs this century is true. It’s just … not the entire story.
The paper’s executive editor explained that the social-media outcry that the headline spurred caused the Times’s senior leadership to take a closer look at and, later, to change it. Fox, in its presentation of the scenario, suggested that the paper was actually responding to criticism from prominent Democrats.
View the complete August 7 article by Philip Bump on The Washington Post website here.