Journalistic sleight of hand

Here's how it works.

The headline reads: "Nearly 30,000 children under age 10 have been arrested in US since 2013: FBI"

Wow.  No wonder they're calling Trump a white supremacist and our border situation akin to the Holocaust.  That's bad.

Then, however, you read down and realize that this statistic is up through 2017, the last year in which we have the most complete data available.  The data is from 2013.  Obama left office in January, 2017.  This was on his watch.  Except for the latter part of 2017, these numbers are Obama.

OK now McFly, think.  What does this mean?  It means that this headline, perhaps meant to shock, awe, grasp and scandalize, is deceitful. Oh sure, it didn't say anything wrong, and it's not false.  Nor did it say it's all Trump's fault.  But notice it leaves off the end date of the data.  Note it makes no effort, in the headline, to make sure we know this is mostly under Obama's watch.

You know, Obama.  The guy who liberals respectfully yet lovingly disagreed with over his flawed, and yet sincere and well meaning, border policy.  Not Trump's Holocaust and Death Camp border policy.  Before which, apparently, many were being rounded up under Obama.

Oh sure, more are probably being arrested and separated now, because the Left/Media have been telling the world to come to America and you'll get in no questions asked, free of charge, and everything free.  So we shouldn't be surprised if numbers have ticked up in the last few years.

But the point is that many defenders of the 'Obama = respectfully disagree/Trump = Hitler' is that anything happening under the Obama administration was just dozens, a handful of unfortunates  and nothing more.  Now we see the obvious.  If we didn't see it during Obama's presidency, it's because nobody was spending much time focusing on it, least of all the national press.

One of the great evils of our age is how the press has trained Americans to look at human suffering and only ask if it can be exploited in order to advance the politics of the day.   During the Obama years, you'd barely know anyone was arrested, tear gassed or separated along the border.  And so many activists seemed happy to echo the silence  That is a far greater scandal than how many Obama actually arrested or separated, or how many Trump has.  And we had best damn well realize that before our souls become more corrupted.