On the whole, I thought that President Donald Trump’s Mount Rushmore speech had enough positive notes to deserve at least a mention.

Putting a punctuation mark on the affirmative, he ended the speech with “…the best is yet to come.”

But the New York Times reporter, Annie Karni, decided, I guess, that it wasn’t worth a mention. Instead she focused on the dark side in her story, “Trump Uses Mount Rushmore Speech to Deliver Divisive Culture War Message.”

Yes, she used the words high up in the story that it was a “dark and divisive speech” even though some people saw some optimism in it. You might not agree that there is little hope to soon climb out of these dark days, but a journalist’s job is to report accurately–meaning not just the words, but the tone and the nuances.

Instead, Karni wrote something different:

With the coronavirus pandemic raging and his campaign faltering in the polls, his appearance amounted to a fiery reboot of his re-election effort, using the holiday and an official presidential address to mount a full-on culture war against a straw-man version of the left that he portrayed as inciting mayhem and moving the country toward totalitarianism. [Emphasis added.]

Beg your pardon, Annie, but “straw-man” is your perspective, but not that of millions of other Americans. It was not a neutral or objective description of what Trump was saying. But objectivity is out the window these days.

If the colleagues at the New York Times wonder why they and the media are regarded with such loathing, this is a perfect example of the unprofessional and partisan journalism that repulse so many Americans.

Throughout Karni’s story were not so subtle hints that she didn’t like what she heard, didn’t like the man who was saying it and didn’t like the whole damn idea of an event celebrating America

“The sparkly, booming show must go on at all costs in the service of the divisive message,” she wrote. Never mind that Karni’s story is the sort of journalism that divides America.

She referred to Trump’s flyover of Mount Rushmore in Air Force One prior to the event as a “stunt.” Of course, when Barack Obama drank a glass of Flint, Michigan water, the Times didn’t call it a stunt, which it was, although Obama gave the Times its marching orders by instructing reporters, “This is not a stunt.”

Her reference to Trump’s “apparent repudiation of the growing pressure to remove statues tied to slavery or colonialism,” failed to mention that some of the destruction was inflicted on other statues, such as President U.S. Grant, a Civil War general and hero.

And this:

But the president’s attempt to drive deeper into the culture wars around a national holiday, during an intensifying health crisis that will not yield to his tactics, risked coming across as out of sync with the concerned mood of the country at a moment when his re-election campaign is struggling and unfocused. [Emphasis added]

Right, never mind that a lot of that concern is about the deep divisions that the left in America is causing or the violence it can’t seem to condemn.

The saddest part about a profession that I had entered in the 1960s is how it is getting trashed by its practitioners. They don’t have the slightest idea about the damage they are doing. To the profession’s credibility and to the country.