We’ve been enjoying the journalistic reaction to Donald Trump’s last victory press conference. The one where he boasted about having acquired the Kluge Winery, renaming it Trump Winery, and said it was “close to 2,000 acres” and near the “Thomas Jefferson Memorial.”
A bunch of bloggers and ink-stained wretches went online, quickly discovered the winery sits 1,300 acres (which is 65% of 2,000), and has 200 acres planted to grapes. And that it’s near Jefferson’s home, Monticello, not the Thomas Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C.
Snippy, but fair, we’d say. Although President Theodore Roosevelt dissed that type of thinking in his “Citizenship in a Republic” speech in which Roosevelt said:
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.
“The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
A couple of readers gave the Richmond Times-Dispatch what it deserved for publishing a snippy piece. The readers snipped back in the comment box, one saying: “I wonder if Lauren Berg remembers when Barak Obama said he visited all 57 states? (For those of you not paying attention, that’s seven more states than we currently have.)”
Another asked: “Seriously – is there no editing? Albemarle, not Albermarle!!!!”
Our Mother always told us, “People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.” That applies to journalism, too.