It’s no secret that the mainstream media largely dislikes Donald Trump. Dubbed the “opposition party” by former Trump chief strategist Steve Bannon, outlets from CNN to MSNBC to the Washington Post and beyond have made minimal efforts to hide their bias against for the President.
With the Mueller investigation looking more and more like the “hoax” Trump claims it is, the MSM passed through the Overton window of credibility long ago – as scores of “anonymously sourced” bombshells have failed to find their target. The result? They’re simply turning Trump into a billionaire martyr.
And now – as columnist David Harsanyi notes in the New York Post – the MSM has resorted to pedantic fact checks of Trump’s State of the Union address that make them look as desperate as they are biased to in their efforts to bring Trump down.
Politico – for example, insinuated that President Trump was lying about the sexual assault of “one in three women” who make the long journey north to cross into the United States illegally. Not so fast – Drumpf, said Politico, which deemed Trump’s statement only “partly true.” It’s actually 31 percent of women, who are sexually abused based on a 2017 Doctors Without Borders report.
The New York Times flatly interjected their opinion into their “fact check” of Trump’s SOTU address – ruling that Trump’s contention that there is “an urgent national crisis” at the border is “false” because illegal border crossings have been declining for two decades, and Customs and Border Protection agents had arrested just half of the number of people per month as they had in the mid-2000s.
As Harsanyi points out – the Times can’t simply define a national emergency using pretzel logic.
Trump didn’t take credit for the number of women in Congress whatsoever, and ” their nitpicking created the impression that somehow Trump had misled the public. He did not,” writes Harsanyi.
And here we get back to the pretzel logic – or a “clue” that you’re about to read a deceptive fact check on the topic of abortion, according to Harsanyi. When an author prefaces their comment by writing that “only” [insert small percentage] of viable babies are aborted, it serves to downplay the “fact check” with their own justification.
And despite the Post‘s efforts to downplay Trump’s abortion comments – they did not “fact check” him whatsoever. Nothing the Post wrote countered Trump’s claim that abortion on demand until (and after) crowning is legal in New York.
“How often it happens is up for debate. What the bill says is inarguable,” writes Harsanyi.
In summary – the mainstream media’s blatantly biased “fact checks” have once again revealed their failure to remain objective, honest and factual. And while those on the left who are deeply mesmerized by partisan echo chambers may let these critiques slide – critical thinkers, particularly swing voters, will see right through the joke that has become modern journalism.