The Trib's STILL Misleading

In this instance, they're hoping you're not gonna check their work (or so I imagine).

But I will.

Take a look at this:

The New York Times and CNBC made a big deal last week over Mao Zedong's 120th birthday. And the chipper accounts were simply abhorrent After all, China's late chairman of the Communist brand was responsible, directly or indirectly, for the deaths of, by one estimate, up to 78 million Chinese people. And this, The Times and CNBC celebrate? Sick. [Bolding in original.]

For simplicity's sake, let's start with The Times made a "chipper" "big deal" "celebrated" Mao's 125th.

It's right here:

To mark the birth of Mao Zedong 120 years ago on Thursday, Dec. 26, statues of the revolutionary leader will be washed throughout the country, Chinese media reported.

Stamps will be issued, books published, documentaries broadcast, photographic exhibitions staged, “red songs” sung, Mao-themed calligraphy displayed, seminars and speeches held, and a businessman and philanthropist, Chen Guangbiao, and other businessmen will distribute corn, flour and oil to children and elderly people in Yan’an, the Communist forces’ revolutionary base in the northwestern province of Shaanxi, according to the state news agency Xinhua. Mao Zedong in 1945.Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Mao Zedong in 1945.

Yet Chairman Mao’s legacy is controversial, even if many ordinary Chinese are deeply proud of the 1949 revolution and revere him.

Wait - where's the "chipper" celebration?  I mean, Mao was responsible for millions of Chinese deaths, right?

Yeppers.  And from a few paragraphs down in what the Trib editorial board called a "sick" celebration of Mao's birthday:

At the heart of the ambiguity is Mao’s legacy as a leader who is seen by ordinary Chinese as freeing China from foreign influence and class oppression, but who also made “mistakes,” as the state-run Global Times wrote on Monday. Those included the persecution and deaths of millions of people in political campaigns that began in the 1950s and lasted into the early 1970s. After Mao’s death in 1976, the government declared him “70 percent right and 30 percent wrong,” an oft-used Chinese formulation. [Emphasis added.]

And then a litle later:

The critical voices are growing. The historian Zhou Xun recalls in her new book, “Forgotten Voices of Mao’s Great Famine, 1958-1962,” an oral history of the Great Leap Forward, Mao’s disastrous attempt to collectivize agriculture and industrialize at breakneck speed, that as a child she ate “stale corn imported from Cuba,” because of the shortage of food even in normally fertile Sichuan Province.

Growing up with stories of a great-aunt who died of hunger during the famine caused by the Great Leap Forward, which Ms. Zhou estimates killed 45 million people, she began researching in the Sichuan provincial archives.

What a sick, chipper celebration of Mao's birthday to be found in the NY Times! The fact that there's no mention whatsoever of the millions of deaths attributed to Mao can only be due to the fact that the Times is a liberal paper!  Liberalism be damned!

You do know that that's what the Trib editorial board was really saying, right?

Amazing bit of lying by omission, doncha think?