Rushmore speech a winner

President Donald Trump made a surprisingly positive impression with his Independence Day speech at Mount Rushmore.

An internet-savvy friend has been helping me update my computer skills and I recently used those to increase the speed of my computer. That was on July 4 and I immediately downloaded the Google app to my iPad.

One of the app’s features is that it can livestream things like speeches and I noticed that Trump was just about to hold forth at the great granite monument. My wife and I watched the entire speech live, the first time we had done such a thing on a computer.

We were both amazed that Trump gave a fine speech and made many excellent points about life in the United States these days. Because of the usual coverage of the president, we expected him to come across as a knuckle-dragging, wise-cracking know-it-all.

But it was nothing like that. He made his points well and recognized the nation’s historic heroes like the four presidents whose visages are carved into the massive Rushmore granite walls. They were, of course, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt.

The most shocking thing about the publicity was that on the day before the speech, CNN mentioned that two of the Rushmore presidents — Washington and Jefferson — owned slaves. CNN said Trump would be honoring people who used slave labor. Though factual, that comment just blew me away.

George Washington and Thomas Jefferson both owned slaves but it is important to remember the context of the time they lived. Large plantations like those of the two presidents’ families required many laborers and the accepted way of providing the needed labor was through impressed servants — or slaves.

Both Washington and Jefferson were noble and intelligent men. I prefer to believe they had, at best, mixed emotions about owning slaves and considered their forced labor a necessary evil. I suspect they felt sorry for their slaves and treated them well by the standards of the time.

I checked The New York Times and The Washington Post the next day to read their accounts of the Rushmore speech. Sure enough, as they always do, they portrayed it as just another example of a public presentation by our knuckle-dragger-in-chief. They made him look like a biased idiot who supports racists.

My attitude about their coverage changed somewhat when I thought back to my own days as a reporter many years ago at The Worcester Telegram in Massachusetts and later at The Anchorage Times. We reporters necessarily had to make decisions about what to include and what not to include in a story.

That usually meant you had to focus on the most interesting things the speaker said. And it sometimes meant quoting items that made the speaker look bad. Our instructions were to cover the facts and leave it to editorial writers to voice opinions. Including your own opinion in an article was a sure way to get yelled at from across the room by the editor reviewing it.

Ideally in such situations the most interesting things should be printed in the context of the overall speech and the fact that Trump’s performance in South Dakota on Independence Day was very good should come across in the article.

But it doesn’t work that way. If it ever did, it certainly doesn’t these days. Readers of those July 5 articles couldn’t help but get the impression that Trump’s knuckles were dangling near his ankles once again.

The problem seems to be largely with media in major cities. With local newspapers and broadcast outlets their audiences see many of those they cover on a day-to-day basis, either personally or in public appearances. That gives a more rounded picture of our leaders and reporters are constrained from including their own opinions. Writing the opinions is left to editors and columnists.

Trump does often go after what he calls the radical left and didn’t miss the July 4 opportunity to do so. He gave the impression that by radical left he included those who tear down statues.

In that regard his comment in the shadow of Mt. Rushmore seemed appropriate.

Tom Brennan is an Anchorage columnist and author of five books. He was a reporter/columnist for The Anchorage Times and an editor and columnist at The Voice of The Times.