The July cover of Time Magazine will show a picture of a stern-faced President Donald Trump staring down and towering over a little crying migrant girl.
The message being: Trump hates kids?
Actually, the message is put this way, in white letters against the red-colored cover: “Welcome to America.” Seriously, it’s a magazine edition that would make the Kim Jong-uns of the world very, very proud.
Time announced its July edition on Twitter this way: “TIME’s new cover: A reckoning after Trump’s border separation policy: What kind of country are we?”
Apparently, the kind of country where the First Amendment is abused by those in the position to know better.
From the Daily Mail, a little tidbit about the very girl Time chose to highlight on its July cover: “The father of the Honduran girl who became the face of the family separation crisis has revealed that … his wife and daughter were never separated by border control agents and remain together.”
In other words: It’s all a lie. That Time nonetheless chose to further this lie on its cover is truly terrible journalism.
But then again, the media, by and large, has been nothing but hateful toward this White House about a border matter that’s been in place for years.
Where were the Time covers of Barack Obama staring down the anguished face of a migrant child reportedly yanked from the side of his or her mother?
As even the left-leaning Vox reported, “It’s not that no family was ever separated at the border under the Obama administration.”
It’s just that members of the media chose to turn blind eyes to the family separations at the border during Obama’s era in office. Not politically expedient, you see.
But Time’s planned July cover goes above and beyond simple trumpeting for the Democrats. It’s pure propaganda, pure and simple.
After all, Trump did sign an executive order putting a stop to family separations. That’s the current news; that’s the current angle.
But showcasing that on the cover would paint this administration in a more positive light — and as Time editors no doubt decided, why let this good crisis that’s being spun at the border go to political waste, right?
It’s not that Time doesn’t have the right to angle its coverage as it wishes. But sometimes, less is more.
Propaganda masquerading as news always comes off as offensive and patronizing to the reader.
First appeared at The Washington Times.
