-By Warner Todd Huston
Russ J. Alan is a writer whose work often appears on the website RenewAmerica.com, a news/opinion site started several years ago by Alan Keyes. Alan’s latest column is about the mess that is Social Security and a quote from his piece was posted on National Public Radio’s website under the rubric of quotes on Iraq. But NPR takes the quote so badly out of context that one would think that Alan was saying just the opposite of what he actually said.
Remember our tax money goes for this NPR “service” to the nation.
Under NPR’s topic page one can search for quotes on any particular subject and the Alan quote is under Topics/Iraq/Quote. There you will find this:
“George Bush and Dick Cheney took every dollar and spent it in Iraq on the war for oil.”
SOURCE: Renew America
Reading that quote one gets the impression that Renew America is saying that the Bush administration”spent every dollar” on Iraq and the “war for oil.” This would be shocking to anyone that knows ahead of time that Renew America is a conservative website. It would also be shocking if anyone knew Russ J. Alan’s writing.
There is, however, a line that says “view quote in context.” Clicking that reveals what Russ was actually saying.
The Democrats keep trying to tell us, we would still have the Social Security Trust Fund in the lock box if it hadn’t been for Jeb Bush and that electoral college thing down in Florida; instead, “George Bush and Dick Cheney took every dollar and spent it in Iraq on the war for oil.” Conservatives must also hear to the point of hurling that President Obama inherited our national debt from the Bush administration.
So, in context we see that the quote is not saying that George W. Bush wasted all our money on Iraq and the so-called war for oil, but was instead saying that this is the false charge that Democrats make against George W. Bush!
This is a pretty shameful posting on NPR’s part. The quote is so far out of context that anyone would have to find Russ Alan’s full piece to understand what he was really saying because that one line lifted from his piece is as misleading as you can get. The question is, how many people will take the time to investigate further and take a look at the whole report compared to how many that will just read the out of context quote and assume that Renew America is attacking Bush’s “war for oil”?
Perhaps NPR realized that far fewer people would take the time to investigate further than would just see the quote and move on with a mistaken impression of what was being said?
It is a pretty shameless move by NPR, wouldn’t you say? Once again, folks, remember that OUR tax money is going to NPR so that it can quote conservatives out of context. Nice, eh?
Here is how the quote looks when you first come across it on the NPR page:
And here is what it looks like in context on the RenewAmerica website:
____________
“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
For a full bio, please CLICK HERE.
Comments are closed.