This sandwich consists of one slice on Sunday, July 12th, and another slice today, with some anonymous pontification in the middle on Tuesday... The sandwich follows the usual M.O. that the character assassination squad at the T&G uses in pandering to public outrage.
When Kathy and I were married at City Hall in 1990, I was led to understand that there was an option to not bother having any ceremony at all. This, I'm sure, is just as available now as it was 19 years ago. Nobody in the City Clerk's office gets a fee if you don't have them perform any kind of ceremony. The ceremony is not a requirement for being officially married.
This, however, isn't mentioned in either of Sutner's slimes on Rushford, nor is it mentioned by the anonymous pontificator(s). That's because the artful omission of pertinent facts is how they smear people.
But neither the T&G, nor Shaun Sutner in particular, can ever be accused of publishing anything that isn't true. That's the wonderful thing about professional journalism. You can take a relatively mundane thing and spin it up to read like a huge, controversial, scandalous situation. You can effectively destroy someone in the public eye by selective reporting of only those facts that support the smear, and omitting anything that might mitigate the effect that's desired in the reader.
Other, lesser tools of the trade include obscuring "when" things happened so that they look like they're all happening right now; attributing large scale outrage without naming a single "who"; attributing all sorts of additional problems without mentioning a single "what"; and suggesting extrapolations of hugely increased wrongdoing by running statistics and numbers through a speculative phrase.
But as I have in the past with this brand of yellow journalism, I'm mostly criticizing the art form they practice. Of necessity, doing that requires playing devil's advocate, in this case for David Rushford. In past cases it's been for Bob Spellane, for Worcester Police Officer Mark A. Rojas, and for Donna C. Byrnes... all of whom have been intensively slimed by the T&G under the by-line of Shaun Sutner.
I don't personally trust anything this guy writes. But if you want to eat that smear sandwich they published this week about David Rushford, feel free to be as mislead as you want.
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1 comments:
I don't trust his stuff either. I've had reason. I've known people Sutner has written about and learned the full facts. As you write, what he writes is true, but it's only partially true. I would hate to be a subject of a Sutner article and I feel bad for anyone who gets to be a target, er, subject. There's always an agenda. Sutner is the Bill O'Reilly of Worcester.
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