Regular readers of my blog know full well that I am no fan of Donald Trump, but I am even less a fan of distorted news coverage. CNN POLITICS just posted an article titled "Trump: Robert E. Lee Was a Great General." Implication: Trump is a racist bigot because he praised the generalship of a racist bigot. The brief article goes on to poo-poo Trump's statement that Abraham Lincoln developed a phobia about defeating Lee.
The problem with the tenor of the article--that There is something wrong with Trump because he recognized Lee's talent for generalship and Lincoln's obsession with defeating him--is that there is nothing wrong with speaking the truth. The article has another problem. It takes Trump's statement completely out of context. Trump was making the point that Ulysses S. Grant was an even greater general for having defeated Lee. CNN provided a clip of Trump's speech placing the comment in context, but a large percentage of readers will stop reading at the headline, and an even larger percentage will stop at the brief article. Only a few diligent readers will go on to view the clip.
The article is a case study in how to mislead by telling the truth. I'm not suggesting that CNN deliberately set out to mislead. I'm suggesting that they should be more careful about how they structure their reporting.
Here's why saying Robert E. Lee was a great general does not make you a racist. Saying Genghis Khan and Tamerlane were great generals (which they were) does not make one a mass-murdering psychopath. And saying Erwin Rommel was a great general (which he was) does not make one a Nazi.
It takes almost total ignorance of the history of the Civil War to suggest that Lincoln was not fixated on the defeat of Lee. The importance of defeating Lee is amply demonstrated by the fact that all the other significant Confederate armies rapidly surrendered after Lee's defeat. Lincoln knew that defeating Lee's Army of Northern Virginia would lead to the rapid collapse of the Confederacy, and he assigned his best general, U.S. Grant, to the job of defeating Lee.
CNN can and should do better reporting than the fiasco of an article on Trump's remarks praising Ulysses S. Grant.
You can read the full CNN article here:
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