Smearing takes the place of political comment in the new style of political ‘journalism’

One tactic which the propagandists of the liberal-progressive world order use is damnation by association. Or, more commonly put, smear.

This is an example of the Guardian’s ‘Diplomatic Editor’ smearing Trump:

The president of the Maldives, Ibrahim Mohamed Solih, is thought to be the first to have congratulated Biden, tweeting his welcome within 24 minutes of the US networks declaring Biden victorious. By contrast, Vladimir Putin, accused of collusion in Trump’s 2016 victory, and Xi Jinping kept their counsel.

It may be of course that these Presidents are waiting for all the results to be counted and the result to be officially announced, rather than responding to the election being called by the commercial US TV networks. But ok. Let’s accept for a moment that Putin is a bad guy. But has Trump done anything here? No – the actions of the bad guy (Putin) in relation to Trump are used to denounce Trump. This tactic of damning someone because they are supported by someone unsavoury is rife in the liberal news media. One would have expected better from people who claim to inherit the mantle of rationalism.

An amusing point to note in the above quote is that now they cannot by any stretch of the imagination accuse Trump of having colluded with Putin – there was a lengthy and well-resourced investigation which failed to find a shred of evidence – they still can’t let it go. Now it is enough that Putin “was accused of collusion with Trump” (which means of course that Trump “was accused of collusion with Putin”). No evidence, even after a lengthy investigation, – but it is enough that the accusations were made. The passive voice is often used when they use this device as they can make it sound much more objective than it is. “Democrats accused Trump of having colluded with Putin” sounds, well, like the partisan political claim it was. So they use the passive.

The tactic of treating allegations and accusations against someone as sufficient to condemn them is commonplace these days in a media which often seems to leap straight from allegation to execution.

A final comment; Trump is being booted out of office by the liberal media – (including the Guardian and Independent both of which operate transatlantically as if the UK and US were part of one geopolitical space, which, of course, in effect, they are). They call him a ‘sore loser’ as they shout abuse at him as he leaves the stage. One of the accusations hurled at him is that he did nothing to stop Coronavirus in the USA. Meanwhile there are 60,000 deaths in the UK of which tens of thousands have been indisputably avoidable. For example, the 16,000 deaths in care homes were, in the words of Amnesty International “entirely avoidable”. [1] Tens of thousands more were caused by the delayed lockdown according to a former Chief Scientific Adviser to government, and others. [2] And yet where do we see the Guardian and the Independent calling for people in government to be held accountable for this? Nowhere. Instead they give airtime to the bland platitudes of the government’s soulless spin-doctors.

Notes