BuzzFeed's Trump story discredited
Mueller challenges allegation that the president urged perjury after media touted claim that he told Cohen to lie.
If the first casualty of war is truth, the second is probably neutrality. (Except for Switzerland.) The media have long been left wing, but they lost all pretense of neutrality during the 2016 campaign. It’s been an anti-Trump crusade ever since.
This Sunday, January 20, 2019, marks two years in office for The Donald. This is an examination of the top seven attack themes from the last two years. Call them The Magnificent 7.
TRUMP SAYS HE APPRECIATES MUELLER’S STATEMENT DISPUTING BUZZFEED REPORT
And, yes, I know, this could be The Magnificent 700, 7,000, or maybe even 7,000,000 and we’d have plenty of content. But I have a deadline:
1. Fake News: Friday night Trump had reason to laugh at his enemies in the press. He tweeted: “Fake News is truly the ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!” Who could blame him? The big BuzzFeed attack against Team Trump had fizzled out so badly that even journalists were admitting that this had hurt the image of journalism.
In fact, Trump’s battle with both Buzzfeed and CNN has bookended his administration so far. He had a press conference in early 2017, before taking office, where he called out both CNN (“fake news”) and BuzzFeed (a “failing pile of garbage”). That sure hasn’t changed.
The fake news theme has been keeping the media busy ever since Trump took office. It got so bad that The Donald organized “The Highly-Anticipated 2017 Fake News Awards.” Journalists went from embracing the term as an attack on outlets they didn’t like to hiding from it like lefty Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., fleeing eager reporters.
2. The Russians Are Coming: Nothing has dogged Trump more than the allegations of some insidious Russian conspiracy. Yet, we're two years into the administration and all we know is that the Russians bought some Facebook ads for about $100,000. That’s out of $27.6 billion in Facebook revenue that year. Or a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of their revenue. More a media smoke screen than a smoking gun.
But it was also just a fraction of the phony Russia stories that have hit since Trump hit town. Here’s a wonderful Daily Caller list from White House Correspondent Amber Athey. She has a dirty dozen of errors, including the classic “the Russians hacked the power grid” … Only it turned out it was a stand-alone computer at the power company. And The Washington Post never bothered to check with the power company before the story.
3. Impeach!: Journalists and the lefties they love have wanted to get Trump out of office since before he won the election. After he took office, the get-Trump-out efforts ramped up. What they couldn’t decide was how to do it — impeachment, 25th Amendment, coup?
If journalism is the first draft of history, it needs more editors.
Impeachment has been the media’s go-to solution for Trump, including the very day of his inauguration, when Time magazine ran, “There’s Already a Campaign to Impeach President Donald Trump.” Days later, the Post was talking impeachment based on a hypothetical. “Constitutional crisis? What happens if Trump decides to ignore a judge’s ruling.” And, two years later, we've got the Atlantic running a cover story this week demanding, “Impeach Donald Trump.”
There was a lot more — from CNN’s repeated insistence that Trump is mentally ill so he can be removed from office, to CNN giving a detailed breakdown on how the 25th Amendment could be used to replace the president. Comedian Rosie O’Donnell even said she wanted to “send the military to the White House to get him.”
4. Trump Is Hitler, or Stalin, or …: TV has become a lot like watching the casting call in the original version of the movie “The Producers.” In the mind of the media, there’s only one current Hitler — Trump.
In the words of comedian Sarah Silverman, “He went full Hitler.” She had a lot of company with that assessment. Every outlet from wacky Salon to HBO’s “Real Time With Bill Maher” compared the president to Hitler. Except Trump must be worse. “I’m not saying Trump is Hitler. Hitler volunteered for the army,” Maher told his sycophantic audience.
Only, it’s not just Hitler. It’s Stalin, Mussolini or any other dictator the media could name. They never seem to realize that an actual dictator wouldn’t let them make these comments.
5. What Economic Boom? The story of the Trump economy is two-fold. On one hand, there’s good news the media have tried to hide from the public — an amazing economic boost, record low unemployment for African-Americans and Hispanics, cuts in excessive regulation and a stronger GDP.
On the other hand, there’s the media trying to wreck it all.
No, that’s not an understatement. Remember those Fake News awards Trump gave out? The top two entries involved the economy. The first was merely New York Times economist/columnist Paul Krugman predicting a global recession.
Here’s Krugman: “If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never.” So much for buying the Times for stock advice, though he did later change his tune.
It wouldn’t have been smart to rely on ABC either, when ABC’s Brian Ross managed to tank the market on a report that “Trump had directed Michael Flynn to make contact with Russian officials before the election.”
If journalism is the first draft of history, it needs more editors.
6. The Jim Acosta Effect: CNN's Chief White House Correspondent Jim Acosta has become the perfect face for the “fake news” era of journalism. It’s been that way from the 2017 presser where Trump told Acosta “You are fake news” to now.
Acosta has gone from auditioning for his own show to the epic moment at the southern border. Along the way, he’s fought with Trump, pretended the Statue of Liberty mandates the number of immigrants we allow in and was so awful at his job he got his press pass pulled for a time.
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The problem with Acosta is the problem with journalism. It’s not about neutral reporting. It’s about inserting himself into every story, pushing his obvious left-wing opinions and using them to attack Trump.
7. Trump Will Resign: If “journalism” can’t take down Trump, there’s always wishful thinking. There’s New York Times RINO columnist David Brooks predicting Trump “will probably resign or be impeached within a year.” That was Nov. 11, 2016. Oops.
He had loads of company. They proposed blackmailing the president by threatening his family with prosecution or just dreamed of it. Vanity Fair asked eight TV writers to come up with their own resignation scenarios. And Times columnist Michelle Goldberg said even if Trump resigned “He will not become presidential.”
Maybe it’s time the media became resigned to the fact that Trump won.
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