-By Warner Todd Huston
Last week President Donald J. Trump held a press conference that sent the media into paroxysms of rage as he stood before them again calling them out for their lies and their “very fake news.” For days afterward they spilled tons of ink and spent miles of bandwidth calling him “un-American” for attacking them. But Trump is right. The truth is the media is just furious at being called on their lies.
On February 16, President Trump led a tour de force of a press conference going well over an hour and ricocheting about to so many topics that the media simply couldn’t keep up with it all. But one thing is sure, the media was quite able to focus on Trump’s attacks on them. And that took all their attention.
During the press conference, Trump slammed the media. At one point he re-branded CNN from merely “fake news” to “very fake news.” Of course he said it in jest and many in the White House press room laughed when he said it. But the facts bear Trump out, after all.
Trump also talked about the leaks the press have run concerning his administration’s inner workings. “The leaks are absolutely real,” Trump insisted. “The news is fake, because so much of the news is fake.”
In other words, there really are leakers inside his administration — and all of them are Obama appointees who are still there because they have yet to be fired — but the “news is fake” because the media then uses those leaks to invent a whole raft of BS stories from them.
One of the first to go off on Trump was Democrat operative and NBC news analyst Chuck Todd. The NBC anchor took to his Twitter account to call Trump “unAmerican” for “delegitimizing the press.”
This not a laughing matter. I'm sorry, delegitimizing the press is unAmerican
— Chuck Todd (@chucktodd) February 16, 2017
Certainly they “delegitimizing” themselves.
But, before we go farther with Mr. Todd’s wild proclamations, let’s recall how he started his professional career, shall we?
Chuck Todd started his adult life as a Democrat staffer and political back room worker.
Todd is one of those journos that came from Democrat political circles — having worked for Iowa Democrat Senator Tom Harkin’s 1992 presidential run — and then crossed over into the world of “journalism.” With that you just know that he can be as unbiased as the best of them in his reporting. Well, if he can we’ll never know it because so far he has not been. Just the opposite, really.
Todd has done a bang-up job for the left in his “journalism” career. Todd’s loyalty to the Democrat Party is probably why he constantly feels the need to breach journalistic ethics — such as they are — and to use his platform to excuse Democrat excess while attacking Republicans.
Another left-wing member of the media chimed in with essentially the same argument. For the New York Daily News, Linda Stasi (really, what better name for a liberal than “Stasi,” the name of the murderous East German Secret Police?) also called Trump un-American for his attacks on the press.
Stasi was happy to point to the founding fathers who, she said, thought freedom of the press was “so important that these freedoms became the first amendment to the Constitution.” No points for originality, granted, but it likely stands as the first time in her life that she cited the founders as a positive example of anything.
In fact, the aptly named Stasi went on hyperbolically to charge Trump with being a “traitor.”
“Calling the free press the enemy is perhaps one of the most traitorous things an American President could ever say,” she wrote.
CNN’s Frida Ghitis also joined in the fun to chick-splain “why Trump wants you to hate the media.”
A recent piece at Fox News lists quite a few others who attacked Trump after the presser, including ABC’s Matthew Dowd and CNN’s Don Lemon.
There is a great piece by the Washington Examiners T. Beckett Adams chronicling a long, long list of media lies since Trump’s inauguration and up to February 18. Adams Said he’ll continue updating this one, but it is a great example of the lies the liberal media are perpetrating.
Granted some in the center right press pushed back against their liberal counterparts. Among others, at TheFederalist.com Julie Kelly noted that the press didn’t care at all when Obama’s administration came out and lied to the nation on national TV. And in the Weekly Standard Mark Hemingway pointed out that the media is assisting in the destruction of the U.S. government by constantly relying on anonymous sources.
But all the caterwauling by the press is revealing. The truth is they are all missing the point of Trump’s slam on the press — and likely on purpose in order to cover up their culpability.
As the media pretends that Trump stands against the literal existence of a free press, the truth is Trump is absolutely not against the press as an institution. What he is against is their constant lies. And with that he is 100 percent in line with how the bulk of the American people feel about the left-wing media’s “fake news.”
Day after day the media lies, not just about Donald Trump but about everything center right in American politics. The media lies about history, lies about ideology, lies about facts, and lies about the intentions of anyone — and I do absolutely mean, anyone — who is even moderately to the right of Joseph Stalin.
Even BuzzFeed.com was forced to publish a story that revealed that regular Joes and Mr. and Mrs. America are sick of the obvious bias of the media.
Sadly for them the liberal media has made its own bed by lying about the facts for generations. That is what Trump is attacking. He isn’t attacking the institution of the media. He’s attacking their lies.
____________
“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing news, opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that wrote articles on U.S. history for several American history magazines. Huston is a featured writer for Andrew Breitbart’s Breitbart News, and he appears on such sites as Constitution.com, CanadaFreePress.com, BizPac Review, and many, many others. Huston has also appeared on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, and many local TV shows as well as numerous talk radio shows throughout the country.
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