Live Free Or Die: America (and the World) on the Brink (22 page)

Remember these examples the next time you hear the Fake News Media whining about Trump's treatment of the press. The hate-Trump
media don't care about keeping government officials honest; their primary concern is advancing the left's agenda, and they'll hype, bury, or skew their stories accordingly.

The media's fawning coverage of Obama could not stand in starker contrast to the daily beatings they meted out to Donald Trump throughout his campaign. They've been obsessed with the man since June 16, 2015, when he descended the escalator at Trump Tower in New York City to formally announce his candidacy. Having quickly decided that he's a racist, the media were noticeably excited when former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke endorsed him. When Trump was asked about this, he said he didn't know anything about Duke, his endorsement, or white supremacists. This simple and straightforward answer sparked a media frenzy. The
Daily Beast
's headline was typical of the hysterical coverage: “Trump won't denounce KKK support.”
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Meanwhile, they didn't show the slightest concern about Obama's
documented ties
to domestic terrorist Bill Ayers.

The media mob's different treatment of the 2016 Republican and Democrat conventions is another damning indictment of their bias. The Media Research Center found that journalists described the Republican convention negatively
twelve times
more often than its Democratic counterpart. Most media reactions to Democratic speakers were positive and “often enthusiastic.” There was also a marked difference in the amount of airtime they gave leaders of the opposing party during the respective conventions—Democratic figures received far more time to comment during the Republican convention than Republicans were given to sound off during the Democratic convention.
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During the campaign, the
New York Times
' Jim Rutenberg made a shocking plea for reporters to abandon journalistic standards when
covering Trump. In an August 7, 2016, column he asked how “a working journalist” was supposed to cover candidate Trump, “a demagogue playing to the nation's worst racist and nationalistic tendencies.” If you believe that, he said, “you have to throw out the textbook American journalism has been using for the better part of the past half-century, if not longer, and approach it in a way you've never approached anything in your career…. If you view a Trump presidency as something that's potentially dangerous, then your reporting is going to reflect that. You would move closer than you've ever been to being oppositional.” He admitted that covering Trump as abnormal and potentially dangerous “upsets balance, that idealistic form of journalism with a capital ‘J' we've been trained to always strive for. But let's face it: Balance has been on vacation since Mr. Trump stepped onto his golden Trump Tower escalator last year to announce his candidacy.”
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Typical of leftists, Rutenberg was arguing that their noble ends (defeating Trump) justify terrible means (eviscerating journalistic standards).

How would these corrupt hacks feel about conservatives arguing that normal journalistic standards shouldn't have applied to covering President Obama because his ideas are dangerous to the republic? Who's to say which president is more “dangerous”? It used to be journalists' job to report the facts and let the American people decide those kinds of questions. Now they're convinced the people can't be trusted to make the “right” decision.

As the media played up Trump's alleged vileness on the campaign trail, they played down his chances of winning. An October 18, 2016, article by Stuart Rothenberg in the
Washington Post
, which was not designated as an opinion piece, was brazenly headlined, “Trump's Path to an Electoral College Victory Isn't Narrow. It's Nonexistent.” He insisted that Trump “trails badly with only a few weeks to go until Nov. 8, and he must broaden his appeal to have any chance of winning. That is now impossible.”
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Rothenberg called Trump “a disaster as a presidential nominee” and “his own worst enemy,” and cemented his place in history as the world's worst political analyst by including this
line: “Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, once part of the Trump scenario, have never been ‘in play.' ”
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With just three weeks to go until the election, Trump had not received a single major newspaper endorsement, according to the Media Research Center, while sixty-eight papers had endorsed Clinton.
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Despite Trump supposedly having no shot at winning, however, an MRC study showed that in the twelve weeks following the party conventions, the media devoted substantially more airtime to Trump than Clinton—and 91 percent of it was “hostile.”
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The media arrogantly assumed they were pulling Trump's strings—forcing him to the front of the Republican primaries while believing he didn't have a chance to win the general election. But it turns out that Trump understands the media better than they understand themselves. In fact, Trump was manipulating
them
, enticing them to cover him whether they wanted to or not.

Politico
's Jack Shafer figured it out, noting that Trump shrewdly ran “a media campaign directly against the media, helping himself to the copious media attention available to a TV star while disparaging journalists at every podium and venue.” Other presidents had attacked the media, said Shafer, but Trump baited them at a whole new level, running against them even more than he was against Hillary Clinton and ceaselessly hammering their pro-Clinton bias. “The most powerful weapon deployed by the Clintons is the corporate media,” said Trump. “The reporters collaborate and conspire directly with the Clinton campaign on helping her win the election all over.” By suckering the media mobs into covering him even while he was attacking them, noted Shafer, Trump could operate a lean campaign, ignoring “all the orthodoxies, eschewing the traditional campaign-building, almost ignoring the field offices and a ‘ground game.' By April [2016] his campaign had only 94 payrolled staffers compared to Hillary Clinton's 795.”
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RealClear Media fellow Kalev Leetaru observed that the press devoted so much attention to Trump that in some ways it helped revive American journalism.
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“In the end, for media outlets that spend so
much of their time attacking Trump, it is clear that they simply cannot live without him,” wrote Leetaru. CNN full-time Trump, Hannity, and FNC hater and Jeff Zucker stenographer—or as I affectionately call him, Humpty Dumpty—Brian Stelter made a similar admission. “Trump is the media's addiction,” said Stelter. “When he speaks, he is given something no other candidate gets. That's wall-to-wall coverage here on cable news. He sucks up all the oxygen.”
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Regardless of which was the tail and which the dog, the spotlight was on Trump—constantly—and the attention legitimized his candidacy even though most of it was openly hostile. “Donald Trump's surge to the front of the GOP presidential polls has occasioned not a little media attention and endless speculation as to why,” wrote George Washington University political science professor John Sides. “The answer is simple: Trump is surging in the polls because the news media has consistently focused on him since he announced his candidacy on June 16.”
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The professor's view was common on the left. It was comforting for them to attribute Trump's popularity solely to the media attention. That allowed them to avoid acknowledging that his positions—cracking down on illegal immigration, renegotiating unfavorable trade deals, and reviving American manufacturing, to name a few—were finding widespread support. “It is tempting to attribute Mr. Trump's surge to something more than media coverage, to assume that his positions must have unusual resonance with Republicans voters, or to infer that Republicans are clamoring for an anti-immigration candidate,” wrote
New York Times
political analyst Nate Cohn. “Those factors do play a role, but the predominant force is extraordinary and sustained media coverage.”
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So the media played a tortured role in the 2016 campaign. They posed as guardians of the public trust warning us of Trump's evils, yet by their own account they played a key role—in fact,
the
key role—in promoting his campaign. Once he rode this notoriety all the way to the White House, one would think the media would do a bit of
self-reflection and cover him differently in order to stop inadvertently helping him. But that didn't happen. Their obsession with Trump is so deep that they're simply incapable of reporting on him fairly and reasonably, even when they know he thrives on their delirious hatred.

It's hard to imagine a more acute form of media bias than Trump Derangement Syndrome/Psychosis. After Trump won election, the
Washington Post
welcomed our new president by adopting the official motto “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” “We thought it would be a good, concise value statement that conveys who we are to the many millions of readers who have come to us for the first time over the last year,” said the paper's spokeswoman. The
Post
insisted that the motto has nothing to do with Trump,
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laughably, given that it was adopted just one month after he took office. With its anti-Trump coverage, you see, the
Post
is saving democracy from the Trumpian “darkness.” A tweet from
The Federalist
's Mollie Hemingway captured the absurdity: “I thought people were joking about this new WP motto: ‘democracy dies in darkness.' They were not. I shouldn't be laughing so hard.”
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The Pew Research Center analyzed the media's coverage of Trump's first sixty days and found it was far more biased than it was for the three preceding presidents. The Trump coverage was 62 percent negative, compared to 20 percent negative for Barack Obama and 28 percent for both George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Only 5 percent of the Trump coverage was positive versus 42 percent positive for Obama, 22 percent for Bush, and 27 percent for Clinton.
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“And it's not a case of overwhelmingly negative coverage on one subject drowning out some moderately positive coverage on other matters,” wrote blogger Allahpundit about the media's Trump reporting. “It was resoundingly negative across the board.”
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The Democrats and the media will weaponize almost any news story to demonize Trump. Consider two shooting incidents, one in El Paso by a white supremacist and another in Dayton by a socialist. The media used the El Paso shooting to smear Trump as a white nationalist and connect him to the shooting of more than twenty innocent people, with the
New York Times
claiming the shooter's manifesto “echoes” Trump's language. Meanwhile, the Dayton shooter's ideology was downplayed and ignored, including his expressed support for Elizabeth Warren and his rants about “concentration camps” at the border that mimic the rhetoric of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other Democrats.
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And of course, you'd have to look a long time before finding a mainstream news article blaming Bernie Sanders because a fan of his shot up a Republican softball practice, wounding Congressman Steve Scalise—nearly mortally—and three others.

The media doesn't just portray Trump as a white supremacist; it routinely describes his everyday supporters the same way. Their smearing of Nick Sandmann and his fellow Covington High School students who attended a March for Life rally in Washington, D.C., was a prime example. Without any facts, the media castigated the students, getting almost everything wrong in their stories and never apologizing when their lies were uncovered. They described the students as mocking and mistreating an elderly Native American who, as it turns out, was the aggressor in a confrontation with the Covington students. A video of the event exonerated the students and exposed the media's lies. A sampling of the media mob's slanderous coverage of the incident: “Boys in ‘Make America Great Again' Hats Mob Native Elder at Indigenous People's March,” said the
New York Times
; “The Catholic Church's Shameful History of Native American Abuses,” declared the
Washington Post
. “Covington Catholic High School students surrounded, intimidated and chanted over Native Americans singing about indigenous people's strength and spirit,” read the lead paragraph in a piece from the
Cincinnati Enquirer
.
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Lin Wood, who is representing Sandmann, will likely make the kid a billionaire due to all the lies
and slander told about him by major media outlets. CNN has already had to settle for an undisclosed amount.
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In their self-defeating war against Trump, the media have compromised their journalistic integrity in countless, often bizarre ways. In September 2018 the
New York Times
informed its readers, “The Times is taking the rare step of publishing an anonymous Op-Ed essay. We have done so at the request of the author, a senior official in the Trump administration whose identity is known to us and whose job would be jeopardized by its disclosure.” The anonymous author then revealed, “The dilemma—which he [Trump] does not fully grasp—is that many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations. I would know. I am one of them.”
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So the
Times
gave a platform to an alleged senior administration official who is working secretly to sabotage the agenda that the American people elected Trump to implement. Instead of denouncing this direct attack on democracy, the media and the left hailed the traitor, now known as “Anonymous,” who was quickly treated to a book deal. Ironically, the person's claims, if true, prove the existence of the Deep State and fully justify Trump's efforts to purge disloyal officials. Yet the media continues to ridicule the Deep State as a right-wing conspiracy theory and furiously condemn Trump as a dictatorial tyrant whenever he tries to remove officials who are actively conspiring against him.