By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
I suspect that there are many in the same boat with me, uncomfortable with the idea of coming down on all fours in support of Donald Trump’s run for the presidency, but who will vote for him anyway. The prospect of the Clintons back in power closes the discussion for me.
That said, I have to admit backing Trump requires that I eat a lot of crow. I can remember saying to myself (fortunately for me, I didn’t get in anyone else’s face about it) that Catholics who backed Bill Clinton’s run for the presidency were selling out; that they were willing for partisan political motives to back a sleazy pro-abortion candidate with the personal morals of an alley cat. Trump’s personal life is not far removed from Bill Clinton’s.
I am comforted in my decision to back Trump by seeing many of the conservative commentators I admire leaning his way: Patrick J. Buchanan, Rush Limbaugh, Andrew Napolitano, and Laura Ingraham, for starters. Their logic is the same as mine: Trump is the only hope we have to keep Hillary away from the White House.
But there is something else that makes me eager to speak out in defense of Trump: the hatchet job he is getting from the media. Whatever Trump’s failings, the media should not be permitted to get away with this attack without some resistance. I have never seen anything like what is happening to Trump. The liberals in the media used to be subtle in their attacks. No more.
If the press gets away with destroying a candidate for political office by changing longstanding guidelines for journalistic ethics, it will send a signal to students in schools of journalism that will change the relationship between the press and the voters from this day forward.
We should not forget that the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of the press was enacted because the Founding Fathers believed the press had a unique role in a democratic society: They were the source of the information that free people needed to vote intelligently and high-mindedly. If instead it becomes an agent of partisan agitprop it marks a bend in the river. It will mean that yellow journalism has become the norm rather than a pejorative term.
I don’t think I am overwrought. People in the media who portray themselves as sources of objective news are hitting us with a barrage of dishonest attacks on Trump — on the front pages of the mainstream newspapers, the nightly network news, the home pages of Internet providers such as Yahoo. They are using tactics that the left would describe as McCarthyite if used by conservatives.
The way that they have depicted Trump’s comments about illegal Mexican immigrants is a good place to start. What Trump said a few months back was, “They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”
Clearly, Trump was not saying that about all Mexicans, or even about all illegal immigrants from Mexico. The media know that he was speaking only about a segment of the illegal aliens. They pretend otherwise to smear him.
The same point can be made about the charge of racism leveled against him because of his criticism of Judge Gonzalo Curiel. Trump questioned whether Curiel could be trusted to make a fair judgement against him in a case regarding Trump University because of “his Mexican heritage.”
But Trump was not contending that all Mexican judges cannot be trusted, just this particular judge. For example, Trump would not have said that George Bush’s Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, also of Mexican descent, could not be trusted. It was the political partisanship of Gonzalo Curiel that led to Trump’s distrust, not his ethnic identity.
The same media reaction was in evidence in their coverage of Trump’s reaction to the attack against him by Khizr Khan, the Muslim immigrant lawyer whose son was killed on a combat mission in Iraq in 2004. At the Democratic convention, Khan brandished a copy of the U.S. Constitution and asked if Trump had ever read the document, charging that Trump wanted “one set of rights for himself and another set of rights for others.”
Say what you will about Trump’s plan to tightly regulate immigration from Muslim countries, his goal is not to prohibit legal immigrants such as Khan. What he is looking for is a way to identify potential Islamic terrorists. His criticism of Khan was meant to make that point. The media ignore the distinction. There is no constitutional issue at stake here.
I’ll leave it to you if this was worse than the fuss they made over Trump’s faulty recollection — again while speaking off the cuff and without a teleprompter — of whether he had seen a plane landing with released Iranian hostages, or one with pallets loaded with untraceable currency as a trade-off for those hostages — rather than the Obama administration’s attempt to disguise the ransom payment they were making to Iran.
Consider also the media’s sudden inability to spot a sarcastic remark when they hear it. They are supposed to be sophisticated wordsmiths, savvy observers who are able to help their readers understand the context of statements by politicians and public figures.
Yet when Trump said he wanted Vladimir Putin to let the American press know if he finds Hillary Clinton’s missing emails, the media acted as if they are hearing a treasonous invitation from Trump to Putin, rather than a comment meant to needle the press for their lack of interest in Hillary’s intrigues. Trump was trying to be funny.
You can say that he wasn’t funny; that it was a bad joke. You can say he should not say things that can be misinterpreted. But the fact remains that the press is supposed to make an effort to ensure that the public does not misinterpret what they hear. In this case, their goal was the opposite: to do all they could to distort Trump’s intentions.
One last example. It may be a trivial one, but it speaks volumes about the motives of the media who are determined to destroy Trump’s candidacy. I have in mind the comments that Trump made to the mother who was holding a crying baby at one of his rallies in Virginia on August 3. Trump’s first comment was, “What a baby. What a beautiful baby. Don’t worry, don’t worry. The mom’s running around, like, don’t worry about it, you know. It’s young and beautiful and healthy and that’s what we want.”
When the baby continued to cry, Trump laughed and said, “Actually I was only kidding, you can get the baby out of here.” The audience laughed. Trump waved at the woman. He laughed again.
Trump may be a lout, but, come on, not this time. He was kidding. He was kidding. Google the incident. He looked like an amateur comedian doing a Don Rickles skit. There was nothing threatening about the moment. Yet the New York Daily News headline read: “Trump Kicks out Baby at Rally.” The New York Times: “Trump Jousts With Baby at Rally.”
This is dishonest journalism. It misrepresented what had taken place, deliberately. If members of the media think the prospect of a Trump presidency a threat to all we hold dear, and are determined to launch an all-out drive to defeat him, fine. They are entitled to do that. But on their editorial pages, not by misrepresenting what happened at events that they are reporting to their readers. And that is what is going on. It is serious business.
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