A child abduction case shows how the media hide the ball on 'gender identity' |
A child abduction case shows how the media hide the ball on ‘gender identity’
Journalism is about sharing plain facts as clearly and as widely as possible. Its great enemy is euphemism. No reader wants to waste time trying to decode deliberately deceptive language or reading between the lines of news reports. If you’re looking for a puzzle, you would probably rather play the Sudoku.
Unfortunately, everyone is being forced to do a lot of news decoding nowadays.
Just look at the New York Times and Associated Press’s coverage of a recent child abduction case. The FBI arrested the father of a 10-year-old boy on charges of international parental kidnapping. But because the accused identifies as transgender, journalists are obscuring the basic details with activist-speak, starting with the first paragraph.
For a story involving such a serious allegation as this one, the Times headline quite nearly framed the FBI as the bad guys: “U.S. Sends Plane to Cuba to Get Child in Transgender Custody Case.” The AP chose: “Trump administration flies 10-year-old back from Cuba amid custody fight involving gender identity.”
Neither headline is false in the strictest sense, yet both are masterpieces of evasion.
The story is not so anodyne as a mere custody dispute, but nor is it about the Trump administration meddling in “gender identity” issues. It is about a divorced father allegedly kidnapping and smuggling his 10-year-old son out of the country in flagrant violation of custody laws.
Unfortunately, any reader trying to understand the basic facts of this case must first hack through a thicket of “she-her” pronouns in reference to the father and various “they-them” circumlocutions.
Here are the facts: A biological male once known as Eri Ethington fathered a son with his then-wife. Shortly after the birth of his child, Eri began living under the name “Rose” and identifying as transgender.
A few years later, the transgender father began to push hard for his........