Lying Before You Get to the Story

The actor Burt Reynolds, who coincidentally was a fraternity brother of mine, passed away not long ago at 82.  We know, of course, that he was married a time or two, including to the actress Loni Anderson, with whom he adopted a son named Quinton, who is now 30.

Reynolds voted for Donald Trump, although he didn't claim to be particularly passionate about it in an interview, possibly to minimize the damage that Hollywood might inflict given their gasping-for-breath shock that anyone would actually have cast that vote.

However, that has to be what accounts for a bizarre headline on Yahoo's "News" feed that is up there as I write this.  The article was by someone named Taryn Ryder, although who wrote the headline is lost to the imagination.

Now the headline itself is not actually bizarre, in and of itself; had it been factual it would have seemed perfectly reasonable.  The headline read:

"Burt Reynolds cut 30-year-old son out of his will: Here's why" 

Lots of people cut their kids out of their will.  Sometimes it's not out of retribution but for perfectly good reasons, such as leaving their estate to a different child who cared for the parent during their latter years.  Perfectly reasonable.  And, of course, often it is actual retribution, which is what we immediately assume when we see the term "cut out of the will."  Cutting out of a will implies retribution.

So if you read only headlines, you would make the logical assumption that Reynolds and his son were at odds, enough to drop Quinton from his will and not provide for him.

And you would be wrong.  So, so wrong.

In fact, as the article actually notes in detail, Reynolds did not bequeath anything to Quinton because he had earlier created a trust through which to pass the bulk of his estate to Quinton, avoiding probate and high inheritance taxes.  He specifically points out in the text of the will that he created the trust for that purpose, and that Quinton had been provided for "during his lifetime", i.e., by Reynolds passing his estate to his son through the trust.

So what was the purpose of the deceptive headline?  In earlier years, that would simply have been click-bait, meant to get people to read the article and see the ads positioned beside it.  But the character assassination that goes along with blasting the fake news that a Hollywood actor had disinherited his only son, carries malice that can't be dismissed as click-bait.

Yahoo owes the Reynolds family and the memory of the late actor a serious apology for that headline, an apology that will never happen.  The malice in the headline is clearly triggered by Reynolds' politics, though Yahoo will never tell you that.  That flat-out fake-news headline would never, ever be used in a similar situation for a liberal icon actor (say, Alan Alda) who had protected his children from huge death taxes by setting up a trust, even as they insist that the rest of us pay more taxes.  And don't kid yourself, they do it as well on the left (the word is spelled "hypocrite", by the way).

Fake news, as President Trump often states, is the enemy of the people (no, he never says that "the press" is; they just assume that by "fake news" he means "them").  The pen, even the online version, is mightier than the sword, and those who smear the innocent (and in this case, the deceased) because they don't like their politics, using that powerful pen, should be castigated in public.

Oh, yeah -- That's what I'm doing now.  Yahoo, you should be ashamed.

Copyright 2018 by Robert Sutton
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