Nonsense, I will have none of this false equivalence! The fearfulness of folks being actively threatened by the GOP -- queers like me, POC, women, undocumented workers (and many of my students or members of their families are among them) -- is NOT "fear-mongering."
> Nonsense, I will have none of this false equivalence!
ReplyDeletehttp://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/18/opinion/both-sides-now.html
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Both Sides Now?
Paul Krugman
JULY 18, 2016
. . .
[W]hile most polls suggest that [Donald Trump is] running
behind in the general election, the margin isn’t overwhelming,
and there’s still a real chance that he might win. How is that
possible? Part of the answer, I’d argue, is that voters
don’t fully appreciate his awfulness. And the reason is that
too much of the news media still can’t break with bothsidesism —
the almost pathological determination to portray politicians
and their programs as being equally good or equally bad, no
matter how ludicrous that pretense becomes. . .
The presumptive Republican nominee wouldn’t have gotten this
far if he weren’t tapping into some deep resentments.
Furthermore, America is a deeply divided country, at least in
its political life, and the great majority of Republicans
will support their party’s nominee no matter what. Still, the
fact is that voters who don’t have the time or inclination
to do their own research, who get their news analysis from
TV or regular news pages, are fed a daily diet of false
equivalence.
This isn’t a new phenomenon. During the 2000 campaign
George W. Bush was flatly dishonest about his policy proposals;
his numbers didn’t add up, and he claimed repeatedly that his
tax cuts, which overwhelmingly favored the 1 percent, were
aimed at the middle class. Yet mainstream coverage never made
this clear. In frustration, I wrote at the time that if a
presidential candidate were to assert that the earth was flat,
news analysis articles would have the headline “Shape of the
planet: Both sides have a point.” . . .
As I said, bothsidesism isn’t new, and it has always been an
evasion of responsibility. But taking the position that
“both sides do it” now, in the face of this campaign and this
candidate, is an act of mind-boggling irresponsibility.
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