Word: downplay
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Like carousers who do not want to know too much about what happened the night before, Americans tend to forget or downplay emotional binges like the idolization of MacArthur. I was talking with a young journalist at the height of 1987's spasm of "Olliemania," when Oliver North seemed -- to some -- to be speaking truth to power. The reporter said he had never seen anything like it -- and I tried to contrast the few weeks of Ollie with the months of MacArthur's heroization. There are many cases in America's recent past in which people have turned from...
...CENSUS BUREAU HAS BEEN QUITE SENSITIVE LATELY to the question of how it releases reports, even going so far as to downplay the release of potentially embarrassing data. So more than a few eyebrows rose when the bureau went out of its way to make news organizations aware of some fresh statistics that could prove embarrassing to Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton. Census officials faxed to reporters rankings of states and their various measures of social and economic well-being, in which Arkansas ranked poorly. The bureau denies any political motives. It's not as if the information was surprising...
...trying to downplay the importance of good grass. What would a Yard be without it? And green grass means healthy things growing, right? Warm weather, flowers, baseball, the Olympics, graduation...
...principal opposition for the Democratic nomination to come from the liberal Mario Cuomo -- and then as a more traditional liberal, when he lost New Hampshire to Tsongas' attack from the right. Actually, these switches amounted to little more than the tactical shifts between what to emphasize and what to downplay that all politicians make and that are fairly legitimate, so long as they do not involve switches in actual positions -- which Clinton generally has not made. Even so, he has opened himself to Tsongas' bitter charge of pandering. In Southern TV ads, he assailed Tsongas for proposing a slower increase...
...game was played on artificial turf, but the Kleinfelder was quick to downplay its effects on the game...