KidsPost on Cheney's accident

Via Wonkette, here's the Washington Post children's section KidsPost explaining Dick Cheney's PR dilemma to the tykes:

Imagine this: You're playing baseball with your brother when you accidentally hit him in the eye with the ball. You go inside, and the sitter gets ice for your brother's eye. Your mom is at work, but you don't call to tell her. Maybe that's because you are worried about your brother, or maybe you don't think it's a big deal, or maybe you know you might be in trouble, even though you didn't mean to hurt anyone.

If you can imagine that situation, you might be able to imagine the kind of week that Vice President Richard Cheney has had.

Hitting someone in the eye with a baseball, shooting a man in the face -- what's the difference anyway?

(The KidsPost setup is all too reminiscent of the immortal "Who broke my window?" commercial from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in the 1980s. If only it had worked on Dick Cheney...)

Update 2/20: Writing on National Review Online's Media Blog, Stephen Spruiell slams the KidsPost article:

So if Dick Cheney is the little kid, the White House press corps is supposed to be his MOM!!!? I can handle slanted narratives and distortions in the A-section, but putting political agendas in the news for kids?

Well, I don't like the metaphor, but I think the American people are supposed to be the ultimate authority figure given that Dick Cheney works for us. The media are just the conduit.

Also, this is a good example of how the ideological press churns out reflexive accusations of media bias. If anything, the KidsPost article minimizes Cheney's accident by comparing it to hitting a kid with a baseball. Nonetheless, National Review Online accuses the Post of having a "political agenda." It's absurd.

Comments

[Jon Henke]

Hitting someone in the eye with a baseball, shooting a man in the face -- what's the difference anyway?

----Um, kids can relate to one of them. It's an analogy to help kids understand the situation, not a direct comparison.

[Brendan Nyhan]

Regardless, it implicitly minimizes the situation. Would the Post have made that comparison if Whittington had died? No. And why not? Because it would have been obscene to make the analogy. I think the same intuition applies here.