Media distortion hits new lows

Another week has gone by in which the media covering the president of the United States has committed reckless malpractice more disgraceful than usual.

Last Friday, President Trump hosted athletes from the 2018 Winter Olympics and Paralympics at the White House. For 20 minutes he celebrated their accomplishments, often calling them to the podium and joking with them. It was a ceremony of pure goodwill, and the president, as any good hotelier would, made sure each one had a memorable experience.

When he brought the gold medalists from the curling team up to the podium to great applause, one of them, Matt Hamilton, exclaimed, “It helped that your daughter was there cheering us on.” Ivanka had held his teammate’s child on her lap during the game, he explained.

It was one of the warmest and most positive events held at the White House in recent recollection.

And it got almost no coverage. All the elite media took away from the wonderful day was a short soundbite in which the president said, “So today, on behalf of the United States, I want to thank every Olympian and Paralympian ... And what happened with the Paralympics was so incredible and so inspiring to me. And I watched — it’s a little tough to watch too much, but I watched as much as I could. It was really fantastic, and I want to thank you.”

And the firestorm of media distortion began.

“It’s a little tough to watch too much, but I watched as much as I could” was positioned by the media as the president being so repulsed by the disabled athletes that he could not bear to behold the spectacle for very long at all.

Of course, all he was saying was that he didn’t have very much time to watch TV.

But truth be damned. The press had what they needed.

CNN’s Jake Tapper tweeted, “‘It’s a little tough to watch too much,’ said the president of the United States about the Paralympics.”

PBS’ “News Hour,” The Hill, the New York Daily News all made hay by running with their distortions: “President Trump draws outrage after saying it was ‘tough’ to watch ‘too much’ of the Paralympics.”

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes followed suit, “Honestly, what the hell kind of thing is this to say?”

Make no mistake: That paid journalists conveyed such misinformation without retraction is toxic and negligent.

To his credit, Hayes did come around a couple of hours after his original post, writing, “So I’ve listened to this way more than I should’ve, and I *think* I’ve come to conclude he means it’s tough to watch too much because he’s so busy being president.”

Exactly. But the deed is done, with the athletes being collateral damage in the media’s hits on President Trump because those Olympians will be caught up in a false narrative, cemented forever on the internet.

Then, on Thursday, MSNBC broke the bombshell news that federal investigators had been “wiretapping” President Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen — a huge and historic assertion. For hours it went on before host Chuck Todd eventually issued a correction, stating that, “It’s not a wiretap where they were listening into the phone calls.”

Oh well, then. It transpired that “wiretap” was actually merely a “pen register” or essentially a call log, a far different legal matter to obtain.

During Thursday’s White House press briefing, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was accused by CNN political analyst April Ryan of being “blindsided” by something Rudy Giuliani had said. Sanders quipped, “Well, with all due respect, you actually don’t know much about me in terms of what I feel and what I don’t.”

Later, on CNN, Ryan read into Sanders’ words and insinuated, incredibly, that she was looking for a physical altercation: “For Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the presidential spokesperson, the mouthpiece for the president of the United States, to say, ‘You don’t know me,’ in certain quarters in this nation, that starts a physical fight.”

Insanity. Ryan must be hanging out in some pretty tough “quarters of the nation” because most viewers would never come to that conclusion.

When Americans rightfully find it too “tough to watch” the elite media, they find alternatives, and it’s happening.