The New York Times, in a front page piece, took a journalistic machete to Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson on Monday, portraying him as a hapless bureaucrat, slow of action, isolated in his office, lacking in expertise, at odds with his president. That may indeed be an accurate picture of the secretary, and I claim no knowledge or expertise on the subject that would put me in position to gainsay the thrust of the piece. But its timing was intriguing, and some elements seemed to suggest, in a purely journalistic sense, that the Times writers (David E. Sanger, Gardiner Harris, and Mark Landler) were stretching to bolster their central thesis.
Glancing merely at the front-page headline —“Tillerson Finds Role Undercut by Oval Office: Discord Emerges Over Middle East Policy”—the reader wouldn’t get the impression that the story below was a highly negative Tillerson profile. Rather, it seemed to be in the same vein as a piece in these spaces on Tuesday, entitled “Tillerson and Mattis Cleaning Up Kushner’s Middle East Mess.” That piece, by foreign policy analyst and author Mark Perry, portrayed Tillerson (and Defense Secretary James Mattis) as struggling to maintain a responsible Mideast policy in the face of impulsive actions by President Trump.
No comments:
Post a Comment