patrick.net

Yesterday, the Washington Post followed the New York Times into Scrooge territory, and ran a whiny story headlined, “Trump aides’ official religious messages for Christmas draw objections.” Like the Times, WaPo couldn’t find anything actually wrong with the religious messages about the religious holiday, so it leaned into complaints about customs. The sub-headline said, “Overtly sectarian posts on official social media accounts contrast with a tradition of secular holiday messages.”

I won’t belabor the point, since I mocked the Times yesterday. But as I reviewed the WaPo story to see if there were anything new, and read example after example of officials posting genuine and meaningful Christmas wishes, it occurred to me that both stories —the New York Times’ and WaPo’s— actually platformed the original religious messages forcing their liberal readers to consider them.

In that sense, all this hand-wringing about authentic Christmas messaging is a variety of Streisand Effect, where the effort to criticize or suppress speech winds up dramatically amplifying its visibility and reach. Well done, WaPo. It’s a kind of Christmas miracle of its own.

Finally, in case you needed any more reason to discount whatever corporate media tells us, the complaint about “broken secular traditions” is a bad joke. Bland, secular holiday wishes are a recent innovation that broke with the much longer traditions of official religious messaging. If anything, Trump’s officials’ tweets and posts merely returned to the original “traditions.”