On Saturday night’s episode of MSNBC’s The Weekend: Primetime, Hylton spoke to former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul—an Obama appointee—about Trump’s summit with Putin in Anchorage on Friday.
“A lot of the press corps that was there, they reported in the minutes and hours after the presser that they saw members of the administration, like Karoline Leavitt, look ashen, almost frightened after what they had seen behind closed doors. What did that indicate to you?” Hylton asked McFaul.
McFaul responded, “We should all be glad that we did not go to Alaska, because I was in Helsinki with you. And I was in Geneva when President Biden met. They traveled a long way for nothing in return, those journalists.”
He continued, ”But that suggests to me that this was a bigger disaster than they’re letting on. To your point, they’re trying to spin it, although they’re not even trying to spin it. That’s a really interesting thing.”
”When I worked at the White House and we would have meetings like this, I was the SAO—the senior administration official—that would call up journalists, that would call The New York Times to say, ‘This is what was discussed,’ to push it this way. They’re not even attempting to do that because they know they don’t have anything to work with.”
I’m not sure the concept of someone “looking like they just saw a ghost” always translates well in photograph form. And it’s more than just the pallid color, there’s all sorts of subtle micro movements and stuff that we might not even consciously register to indicate something is off, that doesn’t translate to photograph.
Right. I’m not saying it’s wrong. It’s just if you put a visual descriptor in it will beg the question of what that actually looked like. They’d probably get just as much mileage out of phrasing it as “they looked shaken” followed by more details in the article. But to put “ashen” in the headline attempts to imply it was really noticeable. Similar to my original comment if an article says someone “slammed” a politician I pretty much ignore it. Clickbait headlines like that don’t help the cause. Regardless of who it’s about it pretty much just reinforces what someone already believes. Pro-trump people reading this article would probably question the same thing and ignore any conclusions while anti-trump people will just nod along knowing whatever happened behind closed doors was utter shit.