Thank you HUFFPOST.
Fox News Legal Analyst Andrew Napolitano Rips Republicans’ Main Argument In Defense Of Trump
I would never have seen this interview with the Fox News senior and sane judicial analyst (saner than Judge Jeanine Pirro of course) Andrew Napolitano had not HUFFPOST featured a story about it.
Watch the interview.
The article, when you click the front page link, is titled “Historic Trump impeachment hearings set to begin, as Dems predict 'phenomenal week'” and is straight up unbiased reporting.
On the main page, however, we have a euphonious alliteration. “Schiff Show” which was composed by a copy writer who may have wanted to evoke the saying “shit show” subliminally in the reader. Calling it a “show” itself minimizes the import of the hearing and writing that the GOP is ready to “poke holes” in the story is also biased.
Wikipedia tells us that usually headlines are composed by copy editors rather than the writer or writers of articles. My hunch is that with some exceptions like satire writers such as Andy Borowitz this is true for most of what we read online.
In the online era we have a new term, clickbait, which has made the job of the copy editor who composes headlines and main page images even more crucial because of the intense competition for readers. Now I expect they work closely with photoshop artists to get those all important clicks.
We’ll never know whether whoever decided on “Schiff Show” deliberately wanted to evoke the unconscious association in readers with “shit show” but as a psychoanalytically (sometimes called psychodynamically) oriented therapist I think about these things.
Psychoanalysis is most often thought of as a clinical practice, but it is also a theory of how individuals and the social world interact, one with serious ethical implications. Long before Donald Trump became president, markets and media—both mass and social—expropriated memories, emotions, and histories and suppressed the possibilities of genuine imagination. The analytic sensibility stands for the recovery of the past and curiosity about what you don’t or can’t let yourself know. It helps people confront concealed repressions and the many distractions from what’s happening all around us. It’s no wonder that totalitarian regimes, whether of the right or the left, have routinely suppressed or abolished it. Reference “The New Psychoanalysis”
Obviously calling the hearing a Schiff Show sounds good and is a fair way to characterize it when you want to minimize or trivialize the fact that this a a serious and highly consequential process to investigate whether a president committed impeachable offenses.
Deliberately designed to sound like shit show or not, maybe the copywriter used the term because it was, as I noted, a euphonious alliteration. After all sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.