The Boston Globe got some blow back last Sunday for creating a mock front page for April 9, 2017, demonstrating what life might be like if Donald Trump were our President.
This wasn’t done on April 1st, but just on a regular Sunday. It makes a point, for sure, but it does seem like kind of a curious choice for a major newspaper.
Some of the comments that resulted from this choice include
- This latest gambit, born of fear and hysteria, to provide Mad Magazine comedy to a failing enterprise going the way of the horse and buggy, is precisely what I would expect from a collection of amateurish reporters who do not report and ideologically tendentious editors who cannot or will not edit.
- Once a paper that used to set the bar for regional and national excellence in journalism, the Boston Globe in a desparate attempt for attention besmirches its increasingly tarnished reputation and shreds its remaining credibility with fake what if high school newspaper journalism.
The comments weren’t all negative, however. People who supported the Globe’s fake news wrote, among other things:
- More concerning than Trump as an individual is the legion of Americans who crave exactly what he is promising, out of step not only with moderate Americans but juxtaposed to the majority of the western world. To say that hatred, intolerance and xenophobia is the result of being economically disenfranchised is to miss the opportunity to address why this segment of society has become polarized. Hiding behind the rallying cry of a bully candidate, their “traditional values” are nothing more than cowardice in the face of change. Too afraid to engage the world out of their own ignorance they seek to extinguish it. No matter how reprehensible these attitudes are they must be engaged in a productive and cooperative manner if reason is to prevail.
- Scary yes, plausible, no. Would congress really go along with any of this? The bigger worry would be cronyism and pervasive corruption at the highest levels. Buy an election, buy a country? Hope would be replaced by fear, civil discourse with anger and fisticuffs. Meanwhile we will continue to subsidize the rich and continue to strip the poor of their remaining assets and borrow to pay for health care.
From my perspective, as I’ve said before, this campaign has gone on way too long already. And we’re still just in April. Journalists are trying to find a way to break through the noise, but this isn’t the way, in my opinion.