Trump’s lies frustrates media
It was bound to happen.
Team Trump and the nation’s media establishment have been on a collision course for quite some time.
The opening salvo in what appears to be all out warfare, was landed last Tuesday afternoon.
During the daily presidential news briefing, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House’s Deputy Press Secretary, was in the middle of yet another tirade against the alleged misdeeds of the “Fake News” media.
“I think we have gone to a place where if the media can’t be trusted to report the news, then that’s a dangerous place for America,” she said.
She’d come armed with the new information that three CNN journalists had resigned after they contributed to a story on CNN.com that falsely indicated that a Trump associate had been linked to a Russian bank.
CNN retracted the story, and apologized to the person involved.
That story never appeared on CNN’s cable network – just on its online component.
But Huckabee Sanders wasn’t concerned about that little detail.
She was more interested in advancing the notion that the news media delights in making up false stories about her boss.
“We’ve been going on this Russia/Trump hoax for the better part of a year now, with no evidence of anything. The story gets covered day in, day out. And I think America, frankly, is looking for something better,” she added.
That set-off one of the journalists in the press pool named Brian Karem of Sentinel Newspapers.
“Come on. You’re inflaming everybody,” Karem shouted.
He was just getting started.
“We’re here to ask you questions. You’re here to provide the answers. What you just did is inflammatory to people all over the country, who look at it and say, ‘See, once again the president is right, and everybody else out here is fake media.’ And everybody in this room is just trying to do their job,” he concluded.
Calling real investigations “hoaxes,” and the networks and newspapers that report on those investigations “Fake News,” has been President Trump’s go-to insult since he’s been in the White House.
In fact, on the day after the Trump administration announced that it was thinking seriously about the possibility that Syria is preparing for another round of chemical attacks, and on the day the U.S. Senate was considering a vote on Trumpcare, he sprayed his Twitter-feed with tweets about “Fake News,” instead.
“So they caught Fake News CNN cold, but what about NBC, CBS & ABC? What about the failing @nytimes & @washingtonpost? They are all Fake News!,” he wrote.
To heck with 22 million people who might lose their health care coverage, or the innocent people who may become savaged by chemical weapons, when he awakened that morning, the President of the United States was consumed by the chance to attack a handful of media outlets.
So when Sarah Huckabee Sanders arrived at the podium for the daily news briefing, at least one reporter decided he’d had enough.
“I’ve been brow-beaten for six months, and I’m told I’m the enemy, and to be quite honest, it’s not accurate. And I think it’s driving a wedge between us and the public,” he said on CNN the following morning.
While Trump sprinkles his daily Twitter-communiques with the phrase “Fake News,” he’s engaging in a deliberate deceit himself.
That phrase was popularized before the 2016 presidential election to highlight the widespread made-up news stories that were hoisted onto the internet for fun and for profit.
Some of the thousands of the people who profited from those stories have freely admitted they’d sat down and fashioned them out of thin air.
But by January, Trump decided that any news coverage that doesn’t proclaim that he’s the only person to “Make America Great,” is “Fake News.”
Yet, he engages in his own form of “Fake News.”
On the day of the Karem/Huckabee Sanders dust-up, it was reported that Trump has distributed pictures of him gracing the covers of Time Magazine to a number of his resorts.
Except, therein lies a problem.
Those covers are (altogether now) FAKE!
A Uniontown native, Edward A. Owens is a three-time Emmy Award winner and 20-year veteran of television news. E-mail him at freedoms@bellatlantic.net