Word: downplay
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Last month, as if to emphasize the point, Exxon hired Philip Cooney, the ex--White House staff member accused of revising government science reports to downplay the link between emissions and global warming. He will work in public affairs on the "issues group." You can guess which one. --By Cathy Booth Thomas/Dallas
...decades, African Americans had not only remembered Lincoln kindly but also invoked him as a present-day force. "The rise of Jim Crow segregation in the South," explains Allen C. Guelzo, "occurred hand in hand with the efforts of Southerners to downplay the significance of slavery both for the war and for Lincoln, and blacks battled back by keeping slavery and Lincoln's image as the Great Emancipator at the forefront of the nation's memory." A common folktale in the mid--20th century South--which Leadbelly poignantly rendered in a song he recorded in the early 1940s...
...Kwanteng Pius Javran, a 22-year-old student in western Cameroon: "We do not regard the Pope as a white man. He is an ordinary person sent to us black men." John Paul used his position to appeal for human rights and religious liberty. Though he had planned to downplay political issues on the trip, as violence spread in South Africa he repeated earlier denunciations of apartheid. In a speech to diplomats in Cameroon, the Pope then broadened the issue beyond apartheid by taking up the cause of all in Africa who suffer human rights abuses: "I would like...
...part, the contrast in styles reflects a contrast in goals: the Soviets sought to play up the summit as a historic occasion, while the Americans tried to downplay it as a low-key business session. But it meant that the Soviets seemed to outmaneuver the U.S. in the battle for spin control. "Yes, I'm perturbed," said a U.S. official. "Not at their side--that kind of p.r. is perfectly within the rules. I'm perturbed by the lack of it from our own team...
HIRED. PHILIP COONEY, 45, former oil-industry lobbyist who, as a White House environmental adviser, came under fire from environmentalists when it was revealed that he had edited government scientific reports on global warming to downplay ecological threats; by ExxonMobil, the world's largest oil company, days after he resigned from the Administration...