One of the media’s formulaic headlines of which I am least fond reads like this: “X isn’t what you think.” Now how does some junior headline writer know what I think about X? It’s just another way for the erstwhile “news” reporters to proclaim, without knowing me, that they are smarter than I am. It’s bad manners, apart from anything else—related to and only a degree or two less offensive than that other longtime bit of media charlatanry: “Everything you know about Y is wrong.” Wanna bet? It may of course be so, but I like the odds that it’s the other guy who’s going to be wrong, since I only have to prove I’m right about something, where he has to show that I’m wrong about everything. But that’s today’s media for you: so cocksure of their intimacy with The Truth because they know that no one (or no one they need to listen to or care about) will challenge them by demanding that they put up or shut up.
I mention it because, after the announcement that Jimmy Carter had entered hospice care at home in February, an early entry in the coming outpouring of media commemorations of the ex-president’s life and work appeared in The New York Times under the headline: “Jimmy Carter’s Presidency Was Not What You Think.”
The author, the Carter biographer Kai Bird, may not have known what I think, but from the headline alone I could
