It's Friday, and I try sometimes to be a little funnier, or a little cuter, or a little bit on a different tack on Friday. So please don't assume this one is funny. It is factual as heck, at least in the fact that an actual "news" outlet (Huffington Post, quoting from the Washington Post) published this piece, and an actual media company (Yahoo) reprinted it. Those publications actually happened.
And it is factual in that, we assume, the events themselves that are cited actually happened. What is laughable is that the two entities above regarded this as "news", to the point that they felt it worthwhile to inform their readers of the fact. What is bizarre is to imagine what they were trying to convey.
I'm going to summarize the article in two paragraphs, which I will gladly attribute to the Huffington Post so they don't come sue me, at least if they wanted to admit that they had anything to do with it. Here goes.
"Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh charged tens of thousands of dollars to
personal credit cards over the past decade, and was sometimes as much as
$200,000 in debt, according to financial disclosure forms reported by
The Washington Post. The reason, according to the White House: baseball. [He] incurred much of that debt buying Washington Nationals
season tickets for himself and his friends, White House spokesman Raj
Shah told the Post, noting that some of the expenses were also used for
unspecified home improvements. The judge had $60-200,000 ... between three credit cards and a personal loan in 2016, but
all were paid off in full or had balances below reporting requirements
by the following year.
"Kavanaugh has since stopped buying Nationals season tickets, Shah
said. [His disclosures] also showed he had two assets worth up to $65,000 in 2017, far less than current members of the Supreme Court, [although] he is not required
to disclose the value of property on such documents (he owns a house
with his wife, Ashley, in the D.C. area, purchased for $1.2 million in
2006). [The] average net worth of current members
of the court was $4.6 million last year ... Kavanaugh ... draws an
annual salary of about $220,000 a year. He also earned around $27,000
from teaching at Harvard Law School."
Let's see. The judge bought Nats tickets -- from the value, it seems like he bought a set of season tickets, one or two pairs depending on where the seats might be. The "... and his friends" suggests that he likely fronted the money on his credit card and was repaid by the friends who regularly joined him, or took all the seats at times, the usual arrangement.
When I lived in Virginia, a friend, Mike, had a pair of good Washington Capitals season tickets (in the front of the upper deck behind one goal). He would put them up for sale via an email group for many games to a set of friends, of which I was just one of several -- I would regularly buy them to go with my older son, as many as 4-5 times a year -- and that was just me. I know what the friend did for a living and thus his assumed income, and figure he probably sold about half the season.
Lots of people do that, fronting and handling the distribution of season tickets, much as the corporations that buy blocks of tickets do. In the case of my friend's Caps tickets, he only charged face value; he was simply doing a favor for friends -- or perhaps we were doing him a favor; by offloading half the expense, he got better and more predictable seats for the games he wanted to see, plus playoff seat access.
If you had told me what you read in the preceding content, I'd have assumed that the judge had done precisely that -- fronting season tickets for the Nationals on his credit card. And given the cost of a season ticket, I would have presumed that he used a mileage or cash-rewards card of some kind, telling his friends that he would front the big bucks on his card and handle the seats' distribution, in return for which he got a huge reward through his card. Duh.
There is even evidence of that, circumstantial though it may be, in that the cards were paid off in full within the year. That would be the likely scenario if what I suggested were actually the case, that he were reimbursed for much of the cost of the tickets. You would assume that, too.
So now, let us take a look at the actual headline that accompanied the above article:
"Brett Kavanaugh Had Massive Credit Card Debt. The White House Blames Baseball"
I'm not freaking kidding. That headline appeared atop the article as presented online by Yahoo News [sic]. I saw the headline and immediately assumed what you also did, which was that Kavanaugh had been betting on the games and lost a ton of money. I read just the headline to my Best Girl and asked her what she presumed, from just the headline. She promptly said "He bet on the games."
For me, the reason my Best Girl and I leaped to that assumption was that it was impossible that even a bunch of lefties like Yahoo could possibly take fronting baseball season tickets for a group on a rewards card, and try to make it a bad thing.
But they did.
I feel a creepy sense that perhaps Yahoo actually intended for us to think that fronting season tickets on a rewards card is a bad thing for a judge to do for his friends and family. Or maybe ... just maybe, they intended for us not actually to read the article, but to draw a conclusion from the headline, because a sizable percentage of Yahoo readers don't get any further than the headline. And they wanted that conclusion to be far, far different from the facts.
Wow. Now, let's put ourselves inside the mind of President Trump, who faces this sort of perverted reporting and broadcasting on a regular basis. Is it any wonder that he repeatedly has to point out the "fake news" rampant in the industry?
I hope the president uses this as an example, and uses it repeatedly. I hope he points out the headline and specifically calls out what it was intended to do and why.
Because it has gotten to the point where you simply cannot trust the news reporting, any of it. I would not want to be an honorable journalist in that business today.
The well is completely poisoned.
Copyright 2018 by Robert Sutton
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