Usu­al­ly, watch­ing and read­ing the news, espe­cial­ly state­ments and claims by those who make it, puts me some­where between despair and out­rage. This week. I tried a new approach, lis­ten­ing for what wasn’t said.

The most fun was the pub­lic part of the meet­ing between Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump and Cana­di­an Prime Min­is­ter Mark Carney.
In front of the cam­eras , Car­ney opened with: “Thank you for your hos­pi­tal­i­ty and, above all, for your leadership.”
The Wash­ing­ton Post cor­rect­ly char­ac­terised that as flat­tery. It’s de rigeur when deal­ing with Trump, who gave every indi­ca­tion he took it at face value and no less than his due.
What nei­ther he nor the reporter seemed to hear was the unspo­ken sub­script: “With­out you, I’d nev­er have been elect­ed and my par­ty would have been con­signed to the polit­i­cal wilder­ness for five and prob­a­bly ten years.”
Instead, Car­ney added: “You’re a trans­for­ma­tion­al president.”
The per­fect fit for the Mer­ri­am-Web­ster def­i­n­i­tion of irony: “the use of words to express some­thing oth­er than and espe­cial­ly the oppo­site of the lit­er­al mean­ing”, zipped right past Trump’s ears.

                           STUCK FOR WORDS

Hav­ing cov­ered two papal con­claves, it was some­thing of a minor rev­e­la­tion to be a spec­ta­tor as opposed to reporter dur­ing the one that just ended.
When you’re putting in what feels like end­less hours try­ing to find some­thing, any­thing that makes any sense, to fill air­time while you wait for the white smoke, you have no idea how quick­ly and how much of what you come up with becomes bor­ing and/or pointless.
The most ubiq­ui­tous exam­ple is the game belea­guered scribes and broad­cast­ers fall back on, mak­ing lists of “papa­bile”, Vat­i­can watch­er slang for car­di­nals with a chance of being the next pope. Pick­ing the win­ner is the excep­tion rather than the rule, which is why we’re jour­nal­ists and not suc­cess­ful horse race punters.
Com­men­ta­tors and anchors with noth­ing to report and in many cas­es lit­tle knowl­edge beyond what’s on the teleprompter or com­ing into their ear­piece, fall back on the cliché that is also wis­dom: “Who enters the con­clave as pope, emerges as cardinal”.
It’s a ver­sion of the insid­er joke for  an all-pur­pose TV piece to cam­era:  “No one knows what the out­come will be. There’s a 50–50 chance it could go either way.  Only time will tell, and tomor­row is anoth­er day.”

                         PITY THE OUTRAGED

The car­di­nals defied con­ven­tion­al wis­dom that an Amer­i­can couldn’t be pope, which one would have thought would be a source of rejoic­ing on the part of the U.S. right wing media.
But when they lis­tened to what the now Pope Leo XIV didn’t say, which is to say any­thing in Eng­lish, it sparked outrage.
NEWSMAX trucked out for­mer sena­tor Rick San­to­rum to com­plain: “He’s an Amer­i­can. And he did­n’t even speak in English.”
One FOX host said he was “puz­zled” that the Amer­i­can pope didn’t speak Eng­lish to the crowd in St Peter’s Square.
Sor­ry your feel­ings were hurt, but there is precedent,
.Not only did Pol­ish Pope John Paul II not speak in his moth­er tongue when he came out on the bal­cony, he apol­o­gised to the throng in St Peter’s Square for his less than per­fect Ital­ian, which he called “our lan­guage”. (Latin and Ital­ian are the offi­cial lan­guages of the Vatican.)
Ger­man Pope Bene­dict XVI stuck to accent­ed Ital­ian for his first greet­ing as well.
Cour­tesy of their posi­tion, moral author­i­ty, trav­els and num­ber of fol­low­ers (1,3‑billion Catholics), popes quick­ly become the most wide­ly recog­nised pub­lic fig­ures in the world.
One  looks for­ward to the reac­tion when Trump doesn’t hear he’s the most famous Amer­i­can in the news.

                                ON THAT NOTE

The announce­ment that the far-right One Amer­i­ca News Net­work will pro­vide “news­feed ser­vices” to Voice of Amer­i­ca is a text­book case of ide­ol­o­gy only hear­ing itself.
The donor-fund­ed web­site mediabiasfactcheck.com rates One Amer­i­ca News “Ques­tion­able based on far-right bias, lack of sourc­ing, pro­mo­tion of con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries, and pro­pa­gan­da, as well as numer­ous failed fact checks. OAN is not a cred­i­ble news source.”
VOA was found­ed  in 1942 with a mis­sion of pro­vid­ing “com­pre­hen­sive cov­er­age of the news and telling audi­ences the trut.
Among its pri­ma­ry tar­get audi­ences are those with lim­it­ed or no access to news oth­er than from tight­ly-con­trolled gov­ern­ment-run broadcasters.
Any jour­nal­ist who has worked in such place — invari­ably dic­ta­tor­ships – knows the peo­ple who live there under­stand from what they are not hear­ing that what they are hear­ing is pro­pa­gan­da, lies and/or nonsense.
Think­ing they will wel­come one-sided news from an Amer­i­can source makes as much sense as think­ing that when Pres­i­dent Trump says “a lot of peo­ple say:” and “some very smart peo­ple have told me”, he’s hear­ing what isn’t being said.
Which means the only way to hear what‘s not real­ly going on in his world is to lis­ten to him, which rather takes the fun out of it.

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