How to Tell the Truth without being Truthful

Written November 2014. Never forget the Left's outrages.

Mainstream media accounts of Michael Brown of Ferguson, Missouri repeatedly referred to him as an "unarmed teenager."  You may recall Rodney King and the repeated press references to him as a "motorist."  Trayvon Martin, we were often told,  was a "child." Was Brown an unarmed teenager,  King a motorist, and Martin a child?  Yes, but by the same token Hitler was a head of state and in that one respect no different from Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. 

Here then is one of the more interesting modes of mendacity.  One implements one's intention to deceive, not by stating a falsehood as is typical with lying, but by stating a truth, one that diverts attention from more important contextualizing truths.  One exploits the belief that unarmed teenagers, motorists, and children are typically harmless in order to distract one's audience from such uncomfortable realities as that the ‘unarmed’ Brown attacked a police officer and tried to wrest his weapon away from him; that the ‘motorist’ King violated intersections at a high rate of speed, endangered his passenger, tried to outrun the police, and resisted a lawful arrest; that the ‘child’ Martin launched a vicious deadly attack on a man he believed to be unarmed after threatening him with death.

The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.  We need to hold journalists to that standard. But truth is not a leftist value. ‘Leftist journalist,’ therefore, is a contradictio in adiecto.