Our Unbiased Media: Headlines Proclaim Ann Romney Connection To "Sex-Trafficking"

Here's the background. You need this background to understand how absurd and biased this is.

Just a couple of weeks ago, Nicholas Kristof at the New York Times claimed he'd interviewed a former underaged prostitute. She said she'd been pimped when she was 16, often via ads her pimp placed in "Backpage.com." Backpage.com is owned by Village Voice Media -- yes, publishers of the venerable, lefty Village Voice. Backpage.com seems to have a lot of ads for escorts. It's franchised in a few cities.

Village Voice countercharged that Kristof had "concocted" the story, because the girl in question was not 16 when Backpage.com existed -- that is, it simply did not exist in 2003 when this girl was 16. It later existed, when she was older, but was only published in a few cities, none of which she lived in.

Kristof rebuts "I didn't know there would be any math" in this journalistic career, and also claims she was pimped up and down the east coast, and worked in a few places where Backpage.com was published. A little later than 16 years old, but who cares about such details? (Answer: I do. The fact that she was 16 is what makes this a child sex-trafficking story. Without that, it may be a sex trafficking story, but it's not a child sex trafficking story.)

So, shock: Leftist media is involved, hypocritically, in the exploitation of women; another member of the leftist media cooks a story and juices it up and then, when the facts come out, claims the facts don't really matter. It's a gestalt thing or something.

Now, here's where it gets biased (as opposed to merely dishonest and shoddy).

Goldman Sachs, until recently, owned a stake in Village Voice Media. They decided to sell this off recently. Whether this is about the Kristof cooked story, I don't know.

Ann Romney has a blind trust with Goldman Sachs.

A blind trust. Meaning she has no idea what they're investing in.

Further, of course, it's Goldman Sachs itself which owned the stake-- not their investors. The firm owns things on its own account.

So what are the headlines?

Well, it's the MSM. Take a guess.

Ann Romney has absolutely nothing to do with Village Voice Media, and scarcely anything to do with Goldman Sachs.

And yet Reuters connects them up in a headline. If you actually read the headline, you can see how thin and strained this connection is.

Ah, but they're right next to each other there, aren't they? They're not connected in real life, but they are connected in Reuters.

Also note the headline omits the words "Goldman Sachs" and "Village Voice." These are brand names, which people would recognize as above shoddy behavior, and hence would not hold it against Ann Romney if she trusted them and was burned. It would be like investing in Johnson and Johnson and then finding out they had some spin-off that stole organs from orphans. People really couldn't hold it against you that you'd trusted that J&J would not be stealing organs from orphans.

In addition, the Village Voice is hard counterculture left, and Goldman Sachs is a strongly Democrat-leaning firm.

That would complicate the picture they're trying to paint here -- if two arch-liberal organizations were involved, how can a passive conservative blind-trust investor be blamed for the actions of liberals? And why is she the focus here, rather than the actual active participants?

So the headline only features "Ann Romney" and "sex trafficking."

By the way-- this whole scandal? Began like two or three weeks ago.

If the geniuses at the New York Times only caught wind of this mid-March, how was poor, dumb, religious Ann Romney to know about it? She's not smart like liberals after all.

Alternate Universe Headline: Commenters wonder why Reuters didn't go with this version of the headline.

Obama's Top 2008 Donor Reaped Profits from Sex Trafficking

Well, "wonder" isn't the right word. Let's just say they've observed this.

Another possibility, given that a dozen Goldman Sachs people work in the Obama Administration:

Obama's White House Filled With Former Sex-Traffickers

posted by Ace at 01:20 PM

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