Misquoting Trump
Columnist Trudy Rubin is a perfect representative of the journalistic trend of misquoting someone and then building a column upon it. It is a tactic used regularly by her and other news persons. Soon the misquote becomes the final word and it is then repeated by others, re-quoted by talking TV heads and promulgated over and over to the listening public. It becomes fact, and who cares about accuracy.
On Friday, Rubin wrote a column denouncing Donald Trump for having stated that he “hoped that Russia had hacked Hillary Clinton’s email server.” Good column hammering the GOP nominee and his love of President Putin. The problem is that he didn’t say that.
What Trump said was that he did not know who hacked into Clinton’s emails but whoever had done it, and if it was Russia, he hoped that the hacker would lay bare the 33,000 which she supposedly had deleted. Clearly, Trump was being sarcastic.
William Juneau,
Parkland
This story was originally published August 1, 2016 at 8:55 PM with the headline "Misquoting Trump."