COLUMN: 'Dishonest media' ratchet up the attacks
Some of the loudest cheers Donald Trump gets when he’s holding a rally is when he blasts the “dishonest media.”
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out why.
Regular people, it turns out, are smarter than the journalists, talk-show hosts and pundits who make up stories on a regular basis to promote their own point of view. People object to being treated like morons, and they resent the media for thinking they can say anything and get away with it no matter how blatantly false.
One of the best of those fake stories made the rounds last week, when the Associated Press published a story headlined, “Giuliani says Trump is better for the U.S. ‘than a woman.’”
Whoa! You would think even the most deplorable of Trump’s supporters would know better than to make such an idiotic statement! So when I saw the headline, I eagerly read the story to find out just why Mayor Rudy Giuliani had made such a stupid comment.
But wait! He never said that at all! And even the unnamed author of the story must have known it wasn’t true because he began his story with the following:
“Did Rudy Giuliani really mean to say Donald Trump would make a better president than Hillary Clinton because he’s a man?”
Everyone reading the story with a scintilla of common sense would have been shouting, “OF COURSE NOT” — especially if they kept reading to find out what Giuliani really said.
So here it is. In response to a question on ABC’s “This Week” about Trump’s tax forms that were published by the New York Times, Giuliani compared Trump’s business acumen to Hillary Clinton’s and asked the following question:
‘‘Don’t you think a man who has this kind of economic genius is a lot better for the United States than a woman, and the only thing she’s ever produced is a lot of work for the FBI checking out her emails?’’
Yep, there it is ... the incriminating statement ... in plain English ... if you slice it and dice it ... and throw out the last half of the sentence!
Giuliani’s real meaning was self-evident: “Don’t you think a man who has this kind of economic genius is a lot better for the United States than a woman who has never produced anything except a lot of work for the FBI checking out her emails?’’ A fifth-grader could have figured it out, so at least now we know that the Associated Press is not smarter than a fifth-grader. Nor are the folks at the New York Times, the Washington Post, Politico or dozens of other news organizations that published the phony story and headline online or in print.
The object of the distorted story, in case you hadn’t figured it out, was not to make Rudy Giuliani look like a chump, but to make women angry at Donald Trump.
There’s nothing wrong with that if it takes place on the Opinion page in an editorial or a column, but it has nothing to do with news reporting.
The same fake reporting came up again last week when Trump held a townhall meeting with the Retired American Warriors PAC on Oct. 3. Trump was asked whether he would support a “holistic approach” for solving the problems of “veteran suicide, PTSD, TBI [traumatic brain injury] and other related military mental and behavioral issues” and whether he would “take steps to restore the historic role of our chaplains and the importance of spiritual fitness and spiritual resiliency programs.”
Trump’s answer: “Yes I would.”
He then went on to explain what should be obvious:
“When you talk about the mental health problems, when people come back from war and combat and they see things that maybe a lot of the folks in this room have seen many times over and you’re strong and you can handle it. But a lot of people can’t handle it. And they see horror stories. They see events that you couldn’t see in a movie, nobody would believe it. Now we need a mental health help and medical. And it’s one of the things that I think is least addressed...”
In other words, there are many veterans who come back without post-traumatic stress disorder and others who are not so fortunate, or as Trump said, “a lot of people can’t handle it,” and they need mental and medical help.
This was spun by the mainstream media as Trump mocking veterans who suffer from PTSD as “weak” or “pathetic.” Again, it only takes a modicum of intelligence to see that the accusation is not true. Trump was expressing compassion for our veterans who have seen things so horrible that “nobody would believe it.”
But here’s the Associated Press headline later that day: “Trump angers with suggestion that vets with PTSD are weak.”
Huh? Say what? Yeah, I know ... the AP did talk to two people who were angry, but no one knows what role politics played in their reactions, and again, the average person is going to watch Trump’s session with the veterans and see him being supportive and compassionate, not mocking or dismissive.
Even Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the Vietnam War hero who actually was in fact mocked by Trump in 2015, defended Trump from the fake reporting:
“This is kind of the classic example of the media feeding frenzy that is going on. The bias that is in the media,” McCain said during a meeting with the Arizona Daily Star’s editorial board. “What he is saying is that some people, for whatever reason, and we really don’t understand why, suffer from PTSD, and others don’t.”
Trump later tweeted his thanks to McCain for his “kind remarks on the important issue of PTSD and the dishonest media.”
Heck, maybe this issue will actually bring Trump and McCain closer together as the election approaches. Now that would certainly anger the “dishonest media,” and I’m not making that up!