Every time President Donald Trump calls out the mainstream media for “fake news” they howl like a hit dog. Despite the fact media figures are indignant at being challenged, the fact is the mainstream media is often biased and just plain wrong. When one source gets the news wrong, it all too often causes other news outlets to take up the inaccurate news story all across the country. For instance, take the example of a story released in February of 2017 about Deputy CIA Director Gina Haspel. The story concerned the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, a suspected leader of Al Qaeda. ProPublica, a group funded by two leftist billionaires, accused Haspel of presiding over “coercive interrogation methods that are widely seen as torture.” The ProPublica piece added Haspel “mocked the prisoner’s suffering”, making her sound like Torquemada from the Spanish Inquisition. Of course that was the point of the story, but it never happened.
Much later ProPublica issued a retraction well after the fact stating, “Neither of these assertions is correct and we retract them.” The retraction was issued more than a year after the initial piece was released and Haspel’s reputation had already been severely damaged. ProPublica piously admitted the “error was particularly unfortunate” as it “muddled an important national debate about Haspel and the CIA’s recent history.” That much is true and ProPublica’s false allegations have certainly helped to shape that same debate. Numerous national mainstream media outlets dutifully reported the ProPublica story as if it were fact, including Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone, while National Public Radio did an interview with Raymond Bonner, the ProPublica reporter who got it wrong. New Republic and NCNB quickly joined the herd, with CNBC howling that President Trump had selected a “veteran torturer in charge of the CIA.” Even MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes admitted of the ProPublica gaffe, “That is a very big error.”
Herbert and Marion Sandler are the leftist billionaires who have provided $10 million annually for ProPublica. The Sandlers have contributed to the Center for American Progress and Moveon.org, hardly conservative causes. In fact, quite to the contrary. The Sandlers clearly have a leftist point of view and their money has made an impact. Brian Stetler of CNN stoutly maintains ProPublica remains “one of the country’s most respected news organizations.” Of course what Stetler means is that other reporters consider ProPublica to be reliable, as most Americans have no idea ProPublica even exists. ProPublica is a news partner for the USA Today network (which owns the Knoxville News Sentinel), the New York Times and NPR.
The biased persists in every day reporting. One only has to look to Larry Kudlow, who has been tapped by President Trump as his chief economic adviser, who makes no secret of his Christian faith and naturally that became fodder for the media elites. MSNBC co-anchor Stephanie Ruhle expressed shock and dismay over Kudlow’s quote referencing “God’s will.” Evidently it is impossible for some of these people to conceive that there are still Americans who believe in God and have faith. Either that or they simply cannot resist the urge to belittle Americans who cling to faith and God. That same aspect was used when 60 Minutes did a profile of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, noting she was “the most hated member” of President Trump’s Cabinet and noted she is a “devout Christian” more than once. Yet these people never question the motives or devoutness of an ayatollah.
It’s getting to the point where it is virtually impossible not to notice the coverage of news by the national media is utterly biased and skewed to their own point of view. They gibe at FOX News for its slogan of “Fair and Balanced”, yet they are no less objective or unbiased. They were about the 2016 elections and just about everything else. It is the mainstream news media that has insisted there was collaboration between the Trump campaign and Russia, because how else can one explain the election of Donald Trump over the prohibitive favorite Hillary Clinton? Of course well over a year after the “investigation” began, there is still not a shred of credible evidence any such thing occurred. The mainstream news media has persisted in squalling the tax cuts helped nobody save for the wealthy, cried that the economy under Trump would tank, and none of it proved to be true. The only thing real about the mainstream news media is there reportage is shamefully biased and fake.
It is “fake news” and Americans needs to be highly skeptical about anything reported by the mainstream media. There’s little difference between the mainstream media of today and the propaganda machines of totalitarian governments of the past. They feed the American public a steady diet of what they want us to believe instead of the news. Yet they wring their hands and wail because Trump calls them out and fewer and fewer Americans accept what the mainstream media reports as fact. “Errors” like those about Gina Haspel have an impact upon lives and reputations and what the mainstream news media seem not to realize is it has an impact on their own collective reputations. As it should.
