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Unmasked. Tim Graham
Читать онлайн.Название Unmasked
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781630061166
Автор произведения Tim Graham
Жанр Философия
Издательство Ingram
For conservatives there is neither fairness nor balance, nor do the elites believe there should be. These journalists sit on the far left of the ideological spectrum, but they declare themselves centrists, and so virtually all things conservative are “far right.” They even delude themselves into thinking the left—they—are always right and the “Right Is Wrong,” as Arianna Huffington titled one of her silly books. The Huffington Post types dismiss conservatives as a “lunatic fringe” that threatens to “hijack” America.
Conservatives are neither to speak nor to be heard.
People hear the echoes of fake news when after a mass shooting the networks load up their guest lists for a “national conversation” in which there are nineteen voices demanding gun control for every defender of the Second Amendment. Or when the “LGBT” perspective is championed as news while anyone opposing it is a “born-again bigot” who doesn’t deserve the time of day for his troglodyte “hate speech” rebuttal. Or when questioning the impending doom of “climate change”—or even questioning the cost of government efforts to “save us” from their hellish predictions—is treated like a “Flat Earth Society” viewpoint unworthy of public consideration.
The news product on television today is riddled with salesmanship. It is no longer journalism. These are campaign ads. In Democratic administrations, the advertisements are emphatically positive, like the arrival of a miracle stain remover or a wondrous kitchen gadget—it slices, it dices, it makes julienne fries! But when the Republicans win, reporters sound like negative campaign commercials in heavy rotation. Mesothelioma kills you. Call this number to speak to our law firm. You could detect their emotional undertone: These uneducated people and their dangerously simplistic patriotism and outdated moral values can’t possibly represent a “mainstream” or a majority! In their Michael Moore mind meld, the liberal “majority” is being unjustly subjected to the elected “fringe” running the government. The inmates are in charge.
Under Trump, the news can feel like a never-ending tornado warning. It’s designed to keep everyone perpetually uneasy. It sounds that the only way to get rid of the horror-movie echoes of the news is to get rid of the president.
These days we don’t turn on the television and find a nightly “newscast.” Instead, we are force-fed a nightly narrative. In the Trump era, that narrative insists that Trump is not just a bad president. He’s so terrible that he needs to be removed from office immediately. Somehow, the most democratic outcome is for democracy to be overturned.
People think of that constant, lurid, aggravated noise when the president decries “fake news.” And it resonates like no other issue in politics today.
The False or Fake News about Trump
Even by our more generous definition, the media have put out a massive pile of some seriously false news about Trump that they’ve been forced to correct. The public humiliation infuriates them, especially when they’ve had to demote or fire employees. Around the one-year anniversary of Trump’s inauguration, someone in the Trump administration had a brilliant idea. The president proclaimed that he would cobble together a list of the worst fake news stories of 2017. The media went bonkers. The New York Times warned that the hubbub over a list “alarmed advocates of press freedom and heartened his political base.” There you had it. On one side, the forces of freedom; on the other, supporters of Donald Trump.
The Media Research Center’s blog site, NewsBusters, released its own list: the “Eight Times the Liberal Media Screwed Up on Trump-Russia in 2017.” So many were fixated on Russia, putting the cart in front of the horse in trying to prove that Trump’s election was imposed by Moscow. What about Hillary’s connection to Russia (see the Uranium One deal)?
Here are the examples found in the report.
• CNN filed an explosive online report that claimed that the Senate Intelligence Committee was investigating the head of a massive Russian investment fund who met with Trump pal Anthony Scaramucci before Inauguration Day. The CNN story speculated that the two might have discussed the new administration lifting Russian sanctions—a tidbit that, if true, would have potentially big financial benefits to the investment fund.
The story cited only a single anonymous source, which showed how flimsy it was. And then it fell apart completely. By the next day, visitors to CNN’s web page found a giant “Editor’s Note” explaining that the story “did not meet CNN’s editorial standards and has been retracted. . . . CNN apologizes to Mr. Scaramucci.” The problem is that this story most certainly did meet their standards.
The three “investigative reporters” at CNN were fired.
• ABC’s chief investigative reporter, Brian Ross, made the jaw-dropping claim that Trump’s first (and quickly fired) national security advisor, Michael Flynn, would testify that during the 2016 campaign, then-candidate Donald Trump had “ordered him—directed him to make contact with the Russians, which contradicts all that Donald Trump has said to this point.”
If true, that conceivably would have put the president in legal jeopardy. Within minutes, Ross’s report was being parroted across the national media, and the stock market fell more than 300 points. But it turned out that Ross had committed the biggest blunder of his career. Ross clarified hours later that Trump made the alleged request of Flynn not as a candidate but after he was elected—which made it a routine act of a transition team, not collusion.
ABC put out a statement: “We deeply regret and apologize for the serious error we made yesterday. The reporting conveyed by Brian Ross during the special report had not been fully vetted through our editorial standards process.” ABC suspended Ross for a month without pay and barred him from covering President Trump in the future. He later left ABC in disgrace.
• Trump’s firing of FBI director James Comey (speaking of disgraces) was widely hyped as the opening scene of a new Watergate or worse. Previewing a congressional hearing that would star Comey, both ABC and CNN claimed that Comey would specifically dispute Trump’s statement that he told the President “on three separate occasions, that I’m not under investigation.”
If this was true, Trump would have been lying about being a target of the investigation. Two days later, Comey said exactly the opposite, confirming that he had assured the President that he was not under investigation. Both CNN and ABC updated their web stories, but ABC never told viewers on television—that’s where viewers had been misled—that its reporting was 100 percent fake news.
• A “bombshell” New York Times story had reported that “phone records and intercepted calls show that members of Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election” and particularly around the time of the e-mail hacking of the Democratic National Committee.
If true, this wasn’t contact just with Russians but with Russian spies. But as usual the Times had next to nothing but fog. Get a load of this sentence: “The officials would not disclose many details, including what was discussed on the calls, the identity of the Russian intelligence officials who participated, and how many of Mr. Trump’s advisers were talking to the Russians.”
In his Senate hearings, Senator Jim Risch (R–Idaho) asked Comey directly about the Times story and whether it was “a fair statement” to declare it was “not true.” Comey responded,