In a recent post I made the case for why context matter so much.
I give examples of when media has taken events out of contexts to push a specific, unrelated narrative.
Well, yesterday, I saw one of the worst and most blatant cases of this from a major news network that I've EVER seen.
CSPAN on Twitter
Here we see CSPAN tweeting about what appears to be President Trump saying something terrible about immigrants as a whole.
Here's the video imbedded:
In isolation, the comment sounds terrible.
Trump is calling immigrants "animals"?
He's saying they're not even human?
THAT'S TERRIBLE!
And it seems like the narrative caught on. Here re responses that exemplify what people would rationally think about this out of context statement:
And, not wanting to miss out on picking the low-hanging fruit, Chuck Schumer jumped in to feed the flames of this false narrative.
So, what's the context?
The statement by Trump sounds TERRIBLE when out of context and heard decoupled from the question.
But it doesn't take a lot of research to figure out what Trump was ACTUALLY talking about.
This is in the thread of the CSPAN tweet:
CSPAN actually posted the full clip with the question here, so you can hear it for yourself and know what he was actually responding to.
You can hear that what Trump was directly responding to was a woman's concern that she cannot tell ICE about MS13 gang members for fear of her own life.
This was a question about dealing with a savage gang of criminal murderers, drug smugglers, and human traffickers.
Trump is saying that MS13 are animals.
Are MS13 animals?
Objectively: yes.
Humans are animals.
But subjectively, yes, they are savages.
The four young men who were hacked to death in a New York park in April were lured there by two women associated with the vicious MS-13 street gang, and ambushed by more than a dozen gang members armed with wooden clubs and machetes who engaged in "a horrific frenzy of violence," according to court documents obtained Wednesday by Fox News.
The new details were released Monday as part of an indictment charging three of the street gang's alleged members -- Alexis Hernandez, Santis Leonel Ortiz-Flores and Omar Antonio Villata -- with the April 11 deaths of the four men
MS-13 ‘initiation killings’: Lured to a park by girls and hacked to death with machetes
What do you think?
I think that Trump was completely right: MS13 are savage creatures that need to be eliminated from this country.
Yes: take care of them, get rid of them, disable them, deport them.
Now, why do you suppose that CSPAN cut out the question asked in their tweet and their YouTube clip? Why is it that they would intentionally remove the question that Trump was responding to, the one that shows he singled out MS13?
I'll let you tell me the reason why.
