After all the years of euphemizing by the mainstream media — the substituting of undocumented immigrant for illegal alien, for example — it was inevitable that the state of modern journalism would devolve into a Tower of Babel. As evidence that we may have arrived, consider this headline from a story at CNBC: “Mom who sued transgender daughter over medical treatment takes case to the Supreme Court.”
Here’s the first paragraph:
A mother in Minnesota who sued her transgender daughter for emancipating herself and then obtaining gender transition care is bringing her case to the Supreme Court, though her daughter is no longer a party to the case.
With all the deliberate obfuscation (emancipation, gender transition care) it’s almost as though the author doesn’t want the reader to understand what he’s talking about.
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
Now compare the network’s headline and lede to those used by LifeSiteNews, a pro-life website:
Mom sues county for giving her minor son sex change without her consent
The Minnesota mother whose son was maneuvered through a “sex change” by county officials has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review her case. She is charging the government with usurping her parental rights when its agents provided her son with transgender services and narcotic drugs against her wishes.
According to the Thomas More Society, which is representing the mother, Anmarie Calgaro, her “due process rights were trampled upon when the county and its referred health providers ended her parental control over her minor son without a court order of emancipation.” This is all plainly spelled out in the LifeSiteNews article. You might be able to piece the information together from the CNBC report but not without an heroic effort to cut through all the political correctness, beginning with the misleading reference to Calgaro’s biological son as her “transgender daughter.”
This is a nightmarish story that CNBC endeavors to make less nightmarish by making it next to impossible for readers to follow.
One last task: Guess which of the above two sources the “fact-checking” website Snopes identifies as “a known purveyor of misleading information.” (You can check your answer here.)
