Anti-Trump bias on display
By now we know that the national media and certainly the establishment press in Washington, D.C., are largely biased against President Trump. What has changed in the last two years is their utter inability to execute their slanted coverage with any degree of subtlety. Indeed, so hasty and passionate are they in their zeal to denigrate the president that they routinely neglect to construct any ruse of objectivity.
For instance, yesterday, when French President Emmanuel Macron addressed a joint meeting of Congress, CNN bailed out of live coverage. Not only was the Macron trip to Washington the first official state visit of the Trump administration, but his address to Congress was the first joint session since 2016.
It is pretty big stuff and certainly the biggest news event occurring at that time yesterday.
But CNN instead opted to dust off their reporters Chris Cillizza and Dana Bash to talk about allegations against Dr. Ronny Jackson, the White House physician and nominee for VA secretary.
Conservative outlet Fox News and its liberal counterpart MSNBC took Macron live.
Why would CNN ignore the biggest, most time-sensitive, live news story even though it was the most compelling item to cover?
The answer seems obvious. Trump and Macron have been getting along famously. Too famously for the tastes of the media elites who consider not just Macron, but French culture, something to worship, with its gorgeous art, rich cuisine, romantic language and progressive embrace of both sexuality and socialism.
So CNN pulled away from their darling Macron because he had just been freshly polluted by Donald Trump. And they stayed away for the entire speech, as we can assume that it would have broken their hearts to have heard kind words spoken by the French president about his American counterpart. Even attributing such an atrocity to Stockholm syndrome would not have eased the pain.
Only after the speech was done did CNN finally get around to covering it, and as you can guess, they plucked every negative passage they could out of the address and served it up to their viewers as an accurate review.
Their TV reporting and Twitter feed summed up the speech as largely a mocking condemnation of Trump on climate change, reading, “French President Emmanuel Macron, addressing a joint session of Congress: ‘We have to work together… let us work together to make our planet great again.’”
Indeed Macron did have some artfully veiled criticisms of President Trump and his policies, but the fact that CNN would not risk carrying the speech live lest Americans witness the many kind words the French president expressed, exposes the news network as more activist than journalist.
We should not be surprised when news media outlets operate outside of their charters, but news consumers need to learn to spot it. On Tuesday, CNN’s Cillizza spent a segment dissecting a picture of the French and American presidents with their spouses. Cillizza picked apart everyone’s finger placement, Melania’s hat and made some other vacuous observations, even managing to work in Gene Simmons from the rock group KISS.
MSNBC also turned from news coverage to childish lampooning when host Nicolle Wallace made a crude inference about all the physicality on display between Donald Trump and Emmanuel Macron, sniffing, “I’ve not seen him touch Melania that many times.”
NBC Pentagon correspondent Hans Nichols took a historical approach to his analysis of the Macron speech, rehashing an event from 2003: “Republicans controlled the House, beneath the well of the chamber, that’s where there’s a cafeteria, and in that cafeteria, they changed French fries to freedom fries.”
One thing is for sure, we never got this kind of coverage during the last administration. Highly paid journalists are routinely serving up nonsense instead of news if it is the kind of news that might benefit this president. If they are going to shirk their prime responsibilities, maybe they should be serving up freedom fries or French fries somewhere.