President Clickbait

by janiem

The screenshot below is from boston.com as of this morning (Thursday 4/13).

In case the text is blurred in the reproduction, the circled headline reads, “Jury in ex-NFL player’s trial to deliberate for 5^th day.”

The headline was there for a couple of days before I realized that the ex-NFL player referred to is one whose name and picture have been featured over and over again on boston.com’s front page in recent years. The guy is a convicted murderer who is now on trial for (IIRC) two more murders.

I’ll probably never know why boston.com suddenly decided to make him front-page-anonymous, but I think it’s a good idea, and I’d like to apply it elsewhere.

Cast your thoughts back to last fall, at the point in the presidential campaign when both conventions were over and the pollsters were mostly predicting a D win. One day, on a whim, I did a pair of control-Fs on the front page of bostonglobe.com (not to be confused with boston.com). My handy browser “Find” feature told me that the D candidate’s name appeared eleven times, the R’s thirty-two.

Some people believe that all publicity is good publicity, and I suspect that President Clickbait is one of them. Would he even be where he is if it weren’t in some sense true?

So to thwart him in this small way, and for other reasons as well, I’d like to propose a National Day of Front- (and back-, and middle-) Page Anonymity for the current occupant of the Oval Office.

We gotta talk, think, and write about him in order to undermine him as much as we can, but we don’t have to name him. Let’s make him, to the extent that we can, the anonymous nobody he should have been all along.

*****

[P.S. This was too tempting to ignore, but next time I’ll revert back to setting politics aside for a bit and writing about something happier – like the fact that the spring peepers are awake, and a fringe of blue water is appearing around the ice that still covers most of the lake across the road.]

Comments

[russell]

don't have name who?

[hairshirthedonist]

fire bad!

[wonkie]

It is time to focus on the harm being done to us by the Republicans in Congress and the Republicans in state government. The con artist is not our biggest problems: a political party devoted to dismantling the institutions of representative government is.