By William Boardman -- Reader
Supported News
Sen. McCain Calls Admiral an "Idiot" -- Why Do Media Promote That?
Context doesn't
matter with clever kitty videos, but politics is different
BuzzFeed, moving up from cute-cat-tricks to catty-Senator-tricks, caused a few ripples in the political swamp on October 22 with its belated, skewed reporting of Republican Senator John McCain calling U.S. Admiral John Kirby an "idiot" on a rightwing radio show in North Carolina on October 15. OK, nobody really expects BuzzFeed News to publish honest news.
Less defensible, though hardly surprising, is the way the Washington Post and other less well known media outfits picked up the "idiot" story fragment and ran with it as if it was the whole story, without further context, much less identifying Sen. McCain's own idiotic statements and falsehoods in the very same radio interview.
Here's the nut of the story, when Sen. McCain, in response to no question, interrupts the host and says out of the blue:
"It's the most amazing thing. It's the most amazing thing. The spin and the lies out of this White House. I mean, it's, it's unbelievable. This idiot Admiral Kirby was asked, I think yesterday, that said, 'John McCain says that we are losing, what do you say?' The guy, you gotta run it, you gotta run it. Blah. Blah. Blah. Blah. Blah. I mean, it's amazing. And how can they possibly now, with ISIS taking about two thirds of the city of Kobani -- they're saying this is effective. You know, there's two hundred thousand refugees out of that town, thousands have been slaughtered". [rambling on other subjects for another minute]"
Radio Host Tyler Cralle didn't know enough, or care enough, to interrupt the senator and point out that Kobani's total population in 2004 was about 50,000. Or that Kobani has been a haven for internal refugee Syrians fleeing the civil war. Or that this flood of displaced persons from elsewhere has reportedly pushed Kobani's population perhaps as high as 400,000. Not surprisingly there's no accurate count of these refugees becoming re-refugees, either elsewhere in Syria or in neighboring Turkey. If McCain actually cared about uprooted Syrians, he would have been advocating for them three years ago.
Fear-mongering is what people do when they have no cogent argument
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