Biased media reap what they sowed with Trump
If the media can dish it out, they should be prepared to take it.
Tuesday night, at a Trump rally in Tampa, Fla., Jim Acosta complained about the crowd booing him, even making it part of his on-air bit with Wolf Blitzer.
“You can hear there is a chorus of boos and other chants from this Trump crowd here — saying things like ‘CNN sucks,’ ‘go home’ and ‘fake news,’ ” Acosta complained.
Then, in what has become a ritual with Acosta, he signed off with some virtue-signalling and then gave a nod to his own, insurmountable dedication to journalism in the face of danger.
“We’re staying right here,” he declared from a heightened riser and separated from the crowd by a steel fence. “We’re going to do our job and report on this rally to all of our viewers tonight.”
He wasn’t done though. He tweeted some footage of the Trump crowd heckling him and wrote: “Just a sample of the sad scene we faced at the Trump rally in Tampa. I’m very worried that the hostility whipped up by Trump and some in conservative media will result in somebody getting hurt. We should not treat our fellow Americans this way. The press is not the enemy.”
The truth is Acosta’s reporting is exactly why so many people at Trump rallies and across the nation despise CNN and other media.
First, the crowd in Tampa had not yet been whipped up by anybody as the president had not yet arrived.
Second, Acosta contends that it is conservatives and Trump fans who are potentially violent while ignoring the fact that Trump supporters were physically attacked on numerous occasions in 2016. It was the anti-Trump angry mob that shut down the rally in Chicago that year. Supporters were beaten, spit on and harassed all across the country.
At most, CNN called these incidents “protests.”
Trump supporters did not accost the Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders crowds in the same way. But no matter, Trump was repeatedly labeled a Nazi and racist on networks like CNN, without challenge.
Republican congressman Steve Scalese and two others were shot just last year by a left-wing activist in Alexandria, Va.
No, CNN, it is not President Trump who has whipped the crowd up against the media, it is the media.
Trump has not helped the cause, though. The president of the United States should not be calling the press the enemy of the people. They are not, and he was happy to appear live on TV news channels through much of 2015 and 2016.
Of course, the press has changed since the ascension of Donald Trump and they simply can’t help themselves anymore. This week, in covering the president’s treatment of the press, the Washington Times was quick to equate him with Hugo Chavez, Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin.
After the Tampa rally, Politico reporter Marc Caputo retweeted Acosta’s photo of the jeering crowd and wrote, “If you put everyone’s mouths together in this video, you’d get a full set of teeth.”
He went on to call the crowd “garbage people.”
And we wonder why they hate the media?
The majority of the established media covering this president are activists practicing daily alarmism. Unfortunately, millions of American still consume their content as unbiased truth. That is going to result in somebody getting hurt.
Reporters covering the White House should not be lying in wait for their star turn as a reward for behaving badly and President Trump must refrain from using his office to recklessly declare the press the enemy of the people.
We must return to civility, and for many that means behaving better, as they did just a few years ago.