In essence, Donald Trump is a salesman who came from the business world where perception may or may not be reality. When the president starts riffing during a rally or press conference, he sometimes gets details wrong or expresses thoughts poorly. As writer Salena Zito once noted, “When he makes claims…the press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally. “
Indeed, according to the perpetually outraged (or pretend outraged) mainstream media, however, Trump’s exaggerations or sometimes inflammatory or crass statements or tweets — which the liberal echo chamber call lies — threaten the very foundation of democracy.
From time to time, this kind of rhetoric by the POTUS can admittedly obscure a more coherent message about his administration’s America First accomplishments and give oxygen to the president’s foes.
This is the same media industry, however, that registered virtually zero indignation about Obama’s substantive prevarications about Obamacare, the Iran nuclear deal, IRS harassment of conservative groups, and various other scandals.
The Fourth Estate Is In Foreclosure
As Howard J. Warner of the American Thinker observed, Trump’s blustery comments “are not material lies that adversely affect policy or citizens (such as President Obama’s assurance that we would be allowed to keep our doctors or insurance plans). The same cannot be said about statements from many of the Democratic opposition. Unfortunately, the media’s prejudice is demonstrated by their lack of reporting on these issues.”
“Journalists” (which Instapundit‘s Glenn Reynolds calls Democrat operatives with bylines) have turned a blind eye on Deep State corruption as outlined in the DOJ Inspector General report and a previous memo from U.S. Rep Devin Nunes because it would reflect negatively on the Obama legacy.
Moreover, the selectively offended media on and off Twitter has sold obviously false stories about Trump and his base often with sketchy sourcing that apparently they wanted to be true, but –as the saying goes — were too “good” to check.
Media Malpractice
These miscues have forced the media to clarify, retract, or stealth-edit many of these bogus stories, usually after they’ve already gone viral. Sometimes they simply refuse to admit they got it wrong. The mistakes are almost always one-way, i.e., in the anti-Trump direction.
The American public got a glimpse of what was to come with news outlets consumed by Trump Derangement Syndrome when the media falsely reported in early January 2017 that the incoming POTUS removed the bust of Martin Luther King, Jr. from the Oval Office.
Lurid conspiracy theories used to be the province of the right, but now left-wing outlets like MSNBC and CNN have lovingly embraced conspiracies and fake news throughout their programming.
As this blog has previously pointed out, Trump — a former Democrat and independent — has taught the GOP how to fight back against the shamelessly biased Democrat-media complex.
Fact-Checking Fail
Independent journalist Sharyl Attkisson has compiled 109 media mistakes through December 31, 2019 during the Trump administration. In the prelude to the list, she explains as follows:
“We the media have ‘fact-checked’ President Trump like we have fact-checked no other human being on the planet—and he’s certainly given us plenty to write about. That’s probably why it’s so easy to find lists enumerating and examining his mistakes, missteps and ‘lies.’
“But as self-appointed arbiters of truth, we’ve largely excused our own unprecedented string of fact-challenged reporting. The truth is, formerly well-respected, top news organizations are making repeat, unforced errors in numbers that were unheard of just a couple of years ago.
“Our repeat mistakes involve declaring that Trump’s claims are ‘lies’ when they are matters of opinion, or when the truth between conflicting sources is unknowable; taking Trump’s statements and events out of context; reporting secondhand accounts against Trump without attribution as if they’re established fact; relying on untruthful, conflicted sources; and presenting reporter opinions in news stories—without labeling them as opinions.
“What’s worse, we defend ourselves by trying to convince the public that our mistakes are actually a virtue because we (sometimes) correct them. Or we blame Trump for why we’re getting so much wrong. It’s a little bit like a police officer taking someone to jail for DUI, then driving home drunk himself: he may be correct to arrest the suspect, but he should certainly know better than to commit the same violation.”
Here is number 109 on the extensive list:
“The New York Times corrects a report it published to demonstrate how people who voted for Donald Trump no longer support him. Their featured example was a man who– it turns out– never voted for Trump in the first place. “
The media is also pretty stingy about reporting on the Trump administration’s actual accomplishments and that 45 (an “imperfect vessel” in the words of Steve Bannon) is the only president in recent memory that lived up to campaign promises.
A Rescue Mission the Progressive Agenda
The media and political class were banging the impeachment drum as far back as November 2016 or thereabouts. Historian Victor Davis Hanson explains why.
“For better or worse, we are now fundamentally recalibrating the United States—not just redressing the prior Obama transformation, but the policies of past Republican administrations as well… So we are watching a great experiment, as all of our past de facto assumptions about regulations, immigration, identity politics, trade, workers’ wages, manufacturing, the Middle East, China, Russia, and overseas interventions are all at once under sometimes chaotic reexamination.
“We won’t know to what degree Trump won his battles against a now hard-leftist Democratic Party, the NeverTrump Right, the media, the academic and cultural elite, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and the Washington deep state until he finishes his first term. In 2020 the people will decide whether such risks were worth taking. But the idea that Trump has ‘failed,’ when the economy is booming, the United States is energy independent, the border is becoming a border again, China is on notice that the past 30 years of appeasement are over, the military is far stronger, and U.S. foreign policy is being radically recalibrated is absolutely absurd.
“Impeachment was never about Trump’s failures, but about fears of his perceived successes.
“The Left, far better than the NeverTrump Right, grasped that Trump is succeeding, and that it has little traction in demanding economic, energy, immigration, trade, and regulatory alternatives. Its lunatic multi-trillion-dollar proposals ensure that it cannot attack Trump on the deficit where he is weakest.
“As a result, the Left rightly concluded that its only hope to save the progressive agenda is to destroy Trump before the people can vote on his agenda, which they rightly fear is succeeding.
Click-Bait and Projection
Writing in the Spectator, Roger Kimball observes that the Democrats (and by extensive, their media allies) are simply projecting:
“The public is sick, sick, sick of the [impeachment] spectacle. Not the news media, of course: drama sells papers and commercials. But the voters have seen, and seen through, this nakedly partisan folly….
“One of the curious ironies about the impeachment pseudo-scandal…It is this: that the Dems were themselves guilty of what they were accusing Donald Trump of. Worried about ‘Russian influence’ on the 2016? How about the so-called Steele dossier, a putrid pile of Russian disinformation fed to Steele by Russians eager to bollocks up the American election process and then paid for by the DNC and the Clinton campaign as opposition ‘research’ that was surreptitiously fed to the FISA Court to spy on American citizens and provide justification for the investigation of Trump’s campaign. The mind boggles, or at least it should.
“In this case, the real Ukraine scandal is the Biden family scandal. Yet somehow Joe and Hunter Biden’s corruption got transmuted in supposed wrongdoing by Donald Trump…”
“Liberal filmmaker Michael Moore argued that President Trump could be on his way to another electoral victory, claiming his support hasn’t dropped ‘one inch’ in the Midwestern battlegrounds that are key to the 2020 presidential contest,” Fox News and several other outlets reported a few days ago.
