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Promoted from the diaries by streiff. Promotion does not imply endorsement.
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The Washington Post published, under the laughable banner of ‘Public Safety,’ a news story by reporter Rachel Weiner entitled “Chelsea Manning released from jail, where she had been held for refusing to testify in WikiLeaks case.”

It was not so long ago that the credentialed media referred to the person now going by the name Chelsea Elizabeth Manning as a ‘transgender woman,’ formerly known as Bradley Manning. In an act of unbelievable stupidity, the government, under President Barack Obama, did not challenge Mr Manning’s filing legally to change his name to Chelsea, though at least the government didn’t attempt the idiocy of transferring him to a women’s prison.  President Obama commuted the remainder of Mr Manning’s prison sentence just before he left office.

Even in those stories of the past, the credentialed media chose to use the feminine pronouns to refer to Mr Manning, something with which I disagreed, and something which my site does not do.

But in the Post’s current article, Mr Manning’s ‘transgenderism’ is never mentioned, nor that he was known as Bradley Manning when he committed his crimes. Indeed, the article simply identifies him, in the first two paragraphs:

Former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning has been released from the Alexandria, Va., jail where she was held after refusing to testify in the grand jury investigation of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, her lawyers said.

She was released because that grand jury has expired. She has been subpoenaed to appear before a new grand jury on May 16 and may be returned to jail if she again refuses to testify, her support team said in a statement.

In two short paragraphs, of just three sentences, Mr Manning is referred to using the feminine pronouns six times. The Post does not use honorifics, the way that The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal do, which would mean that he was never referred to as ‘Ms Manning’ or ‘Miss Manning.’ Thus, it almost seems deliberate that this horrible, one-sentence paragraph was poorly constructed:

She added, as she has before, that she does not believe anything she would say would “provide any value to an investigation.”

One would have thought that a writer with even the most rudimentary understanding of prose would have used Mr Manning’s name, at least as ‘Manning,’ at least once in that paragraph, rather than employ the pronoun “she” four separate times. Either the writer or her editor — we don’t know which one it was — deliberately stressed the cockamamie notion that Mr Manning is female, or the writer and her editor should have received failing grades in freshman English composition.

Freshman English composition in high school, that is!

Given the wholly awkward headline for the article — and the headlines are normally written by the story editor in American newspapers — in which the pronoun “she” was used, I have to suspect that an editor was deliberately involved. Normally, an article like this would have had the simpler headline “Chelsea Manning released from jail.”

In an article that Microsoft Word counts as having just 543 words, including a correction at the bottom, the feminine pronouns are used to refer to Mr Manning 28 times. What professional writer would structure his article in such a manner, unless he was attempting to promote an agenda?

A site search for “Chelsea Manning” produced 20 results (out of 338). In every article but one written by the reporter in question, Mr Manning is referred to strictly as female, and his ‘transgenderism’ is not noted. In the one article which does mention it, the mention is strictly a reference to a claim by his attorneys that “Manning’s recent gender transition surgery, as well as her history of solitary confinement, makes incarceration particularly difficult for her.”

Media bias is not seen, at least not very often, in the printing or broadcasting of deliberate falsehoods, though I would count referring to Mr Manning as female among deliberate falsehoods. Rather, it is usually more subtle, seen in the choice of stories published vis a vis those ignored, and the taking of one side of a controversial point as an assumption underlying the article.  This article in the Post is just another one of those attempts.
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