Salon's Joan Walsh Alters Another Obama Quote To Make It Congruent With The Narrative

The New York Times did this earlier, deleting Obama's line about whether incivil debate caused the Tucson shooting -- "It did not," Obama said, fairly directly, contradicting the New York Times' Narrative.

But The Narrative is more important than a president's actual words, so the actual words had to be changed to reinforce The Narrative.

It's always comical when a religion becomes more important than the god itself. There's a funny scene in Return of the Jedi where the Ewoks want to cook Threepio's friends in honor of his golden divinity, and Threepio keeps saying don't do that, but they ignore him, because the religion says the god gets a feast and it doesn't matter if the god says otherwise. What does he know? He's just a god, after all. What does he know of his own religion?

So it is with Obama and the high priests of the Worshipful Media. The high priests have decided that their hero-god is a bit potty lately, and so they must correct his spaketh-ings so they become inerrantly perfect, as they should be, as the Sacred Scrolls prophecized.

And now High Priestess of Advanced Dementia With Paranoid Complex Joan Walsh of Salon is pressed into the great duty of fixing her god's words so they agree with the prophecy.

Here's what Obama actually said:

“At a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized, at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who think differently than we do..."

Emphasis added. Note that segment seems to be taking both right and left to task.

Here's how Joan Walsh quotes him.

At a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized, at a time when we are far too eager to blame all that ails our world, it's important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we're talking with each other in a way that heals, and not in a way that wounds….

She simply omits the patch about being eager to blame "those who think differently."

And then she attempts to argue the speech was not, in fact, a rebuke of the left at all. She says:

Now conservatives are reporting that Obama's speech was meant to scold those on the left who have dared to discuss the fact that Giffords had confronted violence before her shooting: that someone dropped a gun at one of her town hall meetings, her office door was shattered after she voted for healthcare reform, and she herself told MSNBC that the cross-hairs imagery Sarah Palin used to target her might "have consequences." Obama was brilliantly fair in his remarks, and I've reproduced the relevant section above, so people can decide for themselves if he was in fact pointing fingers as he urged us not to point fingers.

But you didn't, Joanie. You specifically omitted the part where he cautions your ilk against being so eager to blame all the ills of the world on "those who think differently." So how can your tiny handful of readers actually "decide for themselves"?

DW pointed this out, and has written a letter of complaint to Salon. So far, no correction, no explanation. Further...

By altering the content of a quote, Joan has breached one of the highest ethical codes in journalism. I myself and other readers have called her on this in the readers thread repeated, but have not gotten an acknowledgment, an apology or even a correction. The mangled misquote still stands. Is this what Salon has become, Mr. Lauerman?

So in the comments section, it's also been pointed out, and yet as of now, eight days since the breach, the error remains.

Can't. Stop. The Narrative.

Reality-based community or community-based reality?

They're like the dead in Sixth Sense -- they only see what they want to see. So they don't know that they're... ghosts of a fallen age.

posted by Ace at 02:54 PM

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