6 days Ago
This letter will appear after the election is over — and, ideally, decided. However, I believe the headline on the Nov. 1 issue of The Roanoke times should be recognized as perhaps one of the most egregious examples of deliberate, misleading journalism I’ve ever had the misfortune of reading.
As anyone who follows the news even casually knew before Nov. 1, Joe Biden had described all Trump supporters as “garbage” (unless you were dependent solely on The Roanoke Times for your news, since remarkably, there was never a mention of this disgraceful, disparaging remark in any coverage appearing in its pages). Well, certainly I thought the Democratic machine will have to do some kind of damage control to apologize for this incredible — but, unfortunately, not totally surprising — political blunder; consequently I was on the lookout to see how the media would cover the expected response.
Well, on the front page of the Times on Nov. 1 there it was — “Harris denounces comment” and I settled in to see how Joe’s tirade would be magically explained away. Except that it wasn’t — and it wasn’t even Biden’s remark that was being examined — it was referring to a statement Trump had made a day or so prior related to abortion! A person simply scanning the headline would have assumed — as I first did — that Harris was addressing and trying to explain away Joe’s remark when, in fact it was yet another Associated Press/Roanoke Times too-clever-by-half ploy to avoid criticizing the Harris/Biden “team.
” Unsurprisingly, in the same issue on the same page, a story breathtakingly warned everyone that a Trump presidency would “threaten” Obamacare which would be “scale(d) back”. On the sixth page a headline screamed “Opponents Fight Abortion Ballot Measures” — strangely, no coverage/mention of the millions of people who are fighting to stop abortion. The financial pages didn’t fare much better in the fight to portray the economy as being just great, thank you very much, with the reassuring headline “Inflation Gauge Is Down”; however, even the AP must have had a twinge of conscience since buried in the seventh paragraph the sentence “average prices remain about 20% higher than they were four years ago” grudgingly appeared.
Yes, the election is over and we’re all probably glad of it, but I’m sure the Associated Press will continue to spew out slanted, one-sided political “tales” and I’m afraid The Roanoke Times will remain complicit in their duplicity unless and until the Times changes to another, more honest and balanced purveyor of news. Dennis Crowley, Roanoke Editor’s Note: An Associated Press article published on the Times front page Nov. 2, “ Voters view one another with increasing animosity ,” reported the Biden comment and reaction to it.
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