Trump treats media like they treat him -- and they whinge
11 Don Surber by Don Surber
I prefer the British word whinge. It comes from a horse's whinny. Rhymes with hinge. Whine comes from the sound of an arrow in the air. Whinge is the better putdown, according to the Grammarphobia Blog.
The Fake News media is whingeing (correct spelling) a lot about President Trump.
Today's Big Whinge is that the teacher, er, the president, didn't call on them in class, er the press conference today.
He called on reporters from Christian Broadcasting Network and Townhall.
He no longer calls on traditional outlets because they have been at war with him since June 16, 2015, when he entered the presidential race.
Now they demand attention.
Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post, which has no true Trump supporters among its 50 columnists, complained that Trump in three press conferences with world leaders had taken questions only from two reporters each time. They were from conservative outlets.
From Cillizza:
In the case of the last two news conferences — Feb. 13 and 15 — none of the questions asked were about Michael Flynn, the recently departed national security adviser, or the recent revelations regarding the regular contact between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence officials.
Why should reporters ask those questions? They had nothing to do with Canada (the February 13 meeting was with Justin Trudeau) or Israel.
The press can ask away at the daily briefings. The president does not have time for their Gotcha Games. And good reporters know this. And good reporters get access.
And Cillizza knows this, for he wrote: "Simply because all six of the media outlets that Trump has called on of late have varying degrees of conservative bent doesn't mean their reporters aren't serious and good journalists. But, there is a difference in taking questions from outlets with a partisan lean and taking them from mainstream media outlets who are absolutely committed to playing it straight."
Playing it straight? Not when it comes to Trump. Fake News reporters have had it out for him from Day One.
Is this payback?
You reap what you sow.
Cillizza's headline was:
Donald Trump is freezing out the mainstream media. That should terrify you.
No, this should terrify you. From "Trump the Establishment," my new book:
Brian Stetler, CNN’s in-house media critic, tweeted on August 7, “Trump is sowing doubt about the legitimacy of the election. It’s dangerous. Press has a duty to challenge him.” This was the same doubt Dan Rather of CBS and others in the press sowed about how Florida counted votes in the 2000 election. Stetler had been the media critic for the New York Times. His successor, Jim Rutenberg, applauded the media for tossing out objectivity in covering Trump. “If you’re a working journalist and you believe that Donald J. Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalistic tendencies, that he cozies up to anti-American dictators and that he would be dangerous with control of the United States nuclear codes, how the heck are you supposed to cover him?” Rutenberg wrote on August 7. Wait a second. If you believe all those things, then you should not be covering him because your bias is too strong to provide the objectivity the public deserves. But Rutenberg openly advocated treating Trump like baby Hitler. “It would also be an abdication of political journalism’s most solemn duty: to ferret out what the candidates will be like in the most powerful office in the world. It may not always seem fair to Mr. Trump or his supporters. But journalism shouldn’t measure itself against any one campaign’s definition of fairness,” Rutenberg wrote. He called for abandoning fairness by saying the times were abnormal. But be the times normal or abnormal, the rules should apply because of one little question: What if the reporter was wrong? Indeed, what if instead of stopping Hitler, you were stopping Hindenburg, the only man to stop the real Hitler? What if neither candidate was Hitler? What if the election were about ideas?
Baby Hitler refers to the New York Times magazine's poll question: Would you kill baby Hitler? |
