Once again, The New York Times fails.
It's not just that their style guide is stick-up-the-butt and sniffy. Whoever writes their headlines (and yes, we know reporters don't) have taken soft-pedaling to a new art.
It seems kind of significant that Benedict Donald would use Nazi language and imagery in a speech (and social media post) this weekend. Goebbels, Hitler and the rest of the gang never shied from calling Jews and other people they deemed undesirable as "vermin," so Trump repeating that term got a lot of folks' attention. Let's also pause to note that the genocide in Rwanda back in 1994 was ginned up by radio-show hosts that called the minority Tutsis "cockroaches." Comparing people to harmful or disliked animals or insects is never not destructive.
So what did the Times, with its large Jewish readership in New York, do? They covered the story with a headline saying that Trump had taken his Veterans Day speech "in a different direction." Good God.
After many screams of outrage, they half-assedly "fixed" it with "Trump Promises to 'Root Out' the Left." Hmmm, better, but not great.
Forbes got it right: "Trump Compares Political Foes to 'Vermin' on Veterans Day — Echoing Nazi Propaganda."
We don't believe that with his sky-high negatives, Benedict Donald will see the inside of the Oval Office again. But we do worry when journalists appear to do his PR work for him. We cats HISS.
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