Washington Post Partners With Leftist Activists to Shape DisinformationAlas, this is the universal nature of corporate media stories today, leaving their consumers deeply misinformed.
By Rod Thomson
May 9, 2022
The Washington Post recently did a hit job, masquerading as a news story, on Sarasota, Florida and the divisiveness it claims is being driven by some right-wing radicals. It is perhaps the perfect lesson in how today’s media reports a story from the position of a narrative pre-fed by leftist activists and how, by the time the story is published, it is so riddled with errors and disinformation as to appear to be coming from an alternative dimension.
Having lived in Sarasota for 30 years, 20 of which I have spent working in mainstream newspapers, I am familiar with how this works. Many of us knew the Post was working on an attack piece on conservatives Christian and Bridge Ziegler, and we understood they were working directly with the leftist activists, who are quoted extensively. Virtually everything that came out in the Post’s story is wrong or misleading—in a word, propaganda—but that organ’s readers likely will never know it.
So let’s dive right into the propagandistic narrative.
The first seven words set the tone: “This sleepy county on Florida’s west coast . . .” Obviously the author did not visit Sarasota, or simply lied. There is nothing remotely sleepy about Sarasota. It has a reputation for being a big small city, possessing one of the most vibrant midsize downtowns in the nation. I-75 is an eight-lane interstate. There is a thriving biotech sector. It has not been “sleepy” since the 1970s, maybe the ’80s.
But this is an important mischaracterization because the goal of this narrative is to suggest that this supposedly quiet little ideal paradise is being ruined by some right-wing, Trumpian zealots, dragging the county ever more radically rightward and the poor folks in Sarasota are just caught in the middle of it.
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Source:
https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/09/washington-post-partners-with-leftist-activists-to-shape-disinformation/
