Distorted Reporting
by tristero
I honestly don’t know how the Times lets political reporters get away with this egregiously awful level of distorted reporting. Let me summarize first.
The first four paragraphs of the story describe how Representative Slotkin released a statement supporting Trump’s impeachment and then was “shouted down” by MAGA goons at a town hall meeting. The distinct impression you get is that her decision to impeach was wildly unpopular at the town hall.
It’s not until the second sentence of Paragraph Five that you learn the truth. In fact, Slotkin’s constituents support impeachment, and her. And the distortions don’t end there. Slotkin wasn’t shouted down. In fact, despite the MAGA clown acts, she actually read her statement supporting impeachment.
Don’t take my word for it. Here’s the opening of the story:
Impeaching President Trump, Representative Elissa Slotkin said, “was pretty much the last thing I wanted to be working on in my first term as a congressperson.”
Yet there she was at midnight Sunday, holed up in her farmhouse at a desk that had belonged to her grandfather — and, before that, President Woodrow Wilson’s secretary of war — clicking the “send” button on a newspaper op-ed article explaining why, after months of resisting impeachment, she would vote to charge the president with high crimes and misdemeanors.
The blowback was quick and intense. Dozens of angry Trump supporters bearing “Impeach Slotkin, Keep Trump” signs shouted down Ms. Slotkin, a first-term Democratic congresswoman who represents a Republican-leaning district, at a packed town hall-style meeting on Monday morning in a university ballroom in the city of Rochester.
“Hey, hey! Ho, ho! Elissa Slotkin has got to go!” they chanted, amid intermittent cries of “One-term congresswoman!” and “C.I.A. Hack!” — a reference to Ms. Slotkin’s past work as a C.I.A. analyst.
But the voices on the other side, though not nearly as loud, were present in force. Most in the crowd of about 400 people leapt to their feet and applauded when Ms. Slotkin — plowing through her prepared statement as her pleas for civility were ignored — announced her intention to vote “yes” on Wednesday when the House holds historic votes on two articles of impeachment.
Something is seriously wrong at the Times.
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