By DEXTER DUGGAN
As the first anniversary of President Trump’s inauguration approached on January 20, the dominant media, which desperately wanted to free the world from him, themselves had become his captives.
He dominated and shackled their every hour as they helplessly fixated on what rumors, leaks, gossip, and exaggerations they could inflate into the destruction of his presidency, the sooner the better.
Trump’s presidency also provided a certain tonic to strengthen those causes whose news coverage had been anemic, like pro-lifers’.
When Trump’s White House physician, Dr. Ronny Jackson, explained the glowing results of the 71-year-old president’s full physical examination during a January 16 media briefing, reporters felt deathly ill. You mean he’s not on the verge of a fatal disease? He’s not a drug addict or demented or certifiably insane? He might even outlive some of us?
They peppered Jackson with desperate questions hoping to find some thrilling chink in the man who wants to build that sickening border wall. If this had been Barack Obama’s optimistic physical-exam report they’d heard, they would have white-toothy smiled a mile wide. But, being Trump’s, this news was like deep drilling by a dentist without pain killer.
James Freeman posted at The Wall Street Journal on January 17 that the report was “a setback for non-doctors in the media who have been pronouncing our duly elected president a ‘neo-fascist sociopath’ or at least a ‘sick man’ who is ‘not mentally stable’.”
There had been definite public concerns about left-wing Democrat Hillary Clinton’s health during her 2016 presidential campaign, including her inexplicable physical collapse right out on the sidewalk in New York City when she attended a 9/11 memorial. But prevailing media had little interest in derailing her as they do Trump.
Dominant, and partisan, media long ago ceased to be “the free press.” They fettered themselves to promoting the power politics that advanced such corrosive special interests as eugenics-crazed, conscience-deadened Planned Parenthood and family destroying globalist corporatism. Now the president was facing them down nose-to-nose, toe-to-toe.
No longer was Trump the reality-television media star whom they’d liked just fine when he palled around as a Manhattan multibillionaire with liberal Democrats like Hillary Clinton and Jesse Jackson Sr.
Trump already made plain during his presidential campaign that self-congratulating dominant media weren’t above his direct criticism. And he showed how he could raise the stakes when, soon after his January inauguration, ABC News’ David Muir in an interview asked Trump if he heard the voices of the recent “women’s rights” pro-abortion marchers in D.C.
Muir opened the door, and Trump took the opportunity to dash right in. Voicing the sort of astonishment of many other Americans who at best had seen a few seconds or inches of news coverage of massive pro-life demonstrations, the president said:
“You’re gonna have a large crowd on Friday, too, which is mostly pro-life people. You’re gonna have a lot of people coming on Friday, and I will say this, and I didn’t realize this, but I was told, you will have a very large crowd of people. I don’t know — as large or larger — some people say it’s gonna be larger. Pro-life people. And they say the press doesn’t cover them.”
When Muir tried to dodge the implication of media bias, Trump repeated, “What they do say is that the press doesn’t cover them.”
As a longtime New Yorker, Trump could have read the agenda-setting New York Times in some Januarys literally without seeing one paragraph about a massive pro-life turnout in frigid weather in the nation’s capital the previous day, even though the Times would find space for whatever it pleased of less import.
Other Januarys, he may have read a downplayed story, or unfavorable editing that might as well have been done at Planned Parenthood headquarters.
And even if the coverage viewed the Washington, D.C., march as noteworthy, it’s highly unlikely there would have been any recognition that the turnout in the nation’s capital was only the largest of hundreds of January pro-life marches and rallies around the U.S., from sea to sea.
Dominant pro-abortion media had every personal interest in advancing their own agenda by mismanaging the news. Their own extremism was barely shared, while national rejection of the U.S. Supreme Court’s abortion radicalism was overwhelming. Or would be if reality had been reported for decades instead of propaganda to make baby slaughter seem benign and pro-life proportions microscopic.
Suddenly, new Vice President Mike Pence brought wider attention to pro-lifers when he spoke at the 2017 national March for Life. And Trump was scheduled to address the March live by satellite this year on January 19, the day after this hard-copy edition of The Wanderer went to press.
Trump, himself the subject of hourly and daily battering by hostile media, also could comprehend the other kind of bias, one that ignores what it doesn’t want others to know. Like media silencing pro-lifers and other moral traditionalists.
It’s not a free and fair media that Trump complains of. It’s one that’s as rawly partisan as official Democratic Party press releases.
U.S. presidents always have complained about press coverage they received, even way back in the days when type was hand-set and presses were flatbed. But that doesn’t mean their complaints all have been equally invalid.
When CNN sat down with six Youngstown, Ohio, Democrats of various backgrounds who’d all voted for Trump, they were pleased with his first year, still opposed to illegal immigration, and saw the media as unfair to him.
A young black woman in school, Justis Harrison, viewed law-breaking immigration this way: “I feel like when people come here illegally, that’s just very disrespectful. You don’t respect our laws and you shouldn’t be able to come here freewheeling like that.”
And black pastor Derrick Anderson said, “He’s doing wonderful, he’s staying on task.”
Their views couldn’t have been more different than dominant media’s, or than open-borders Never Trumper GOP Sen. Jeff Flake’s, of Arizona, who finally brought forth an attack on Trump on January 17 that he’d built up for days through his friendly media.
In more than 2,100 words of schoolmasterish arrogance, delivered to cameras but a nearly empty Senate chamber, Flake lectured Trump about what a threat the president is to a free press and democracy itself. Here’s just one sample of Flake’s arched-eyebrow moralism:
“Not only has the past year seen an American president borrow despotic language to refer to the free press, but it seems he has in turn inspired dictators and authoritarians with his own language. This is reprehensible….We are…in an era in which the authoritarian impulse is reasserting itself, to challenge free people and free societies, everywhere.”
The Republican Party’s national chairwoman, Ronna McDaniel, said Flake should start paying attention to the real world of media bias. McDaniel tweeted: “Sen. Flake, turn on the news. It’s wall-to-wall with biased coverage against @POTUS. He has every right to push back. Comparing the leader of the free world to murderous dictators is absurd. You’ve gone too far.”
McDaniel also said: “We have a media that spends 90 percent of coverage negatively on @POTUS, and that’s totally out of balance with where our country is today.”
White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders appropriately noted the dissonance of Flake’s asserted enmity to authoritarianism while he is known for his defense of the Communist totalitarian rulers of Cuba.
Huckabee Sanders told a press briefing Flake “was recently defending an actually repressive regime” when he went to Cuba and acted as “a mouthpiece” for that dictatorship.
Indeed, Flake’s fondness for succoring the Communist island prison was one reason his popularity declined among Arizona voters.
In a column posted January 13 at Townhall, Cuban-American writer Humberto Fontova noted the Communist regime’s record “for jailing and torturing political prisoners at a higher rate than Stalin’s during the Great Terror, murdering more political prisoners in its first three years in power than Hitler’s in its first six, that pleaded, begged, and finally even tried tricking Nikita Khrushchev into nuking the U.S., that provided moral and material support to practically every terror group on earth. . . .”
Alluding to when leftist Jane Fonda as a young actress was photographed hopping onto a Communist anti-aircraft gun during the Vietnam War, Fontova snapped that it’s too bad there wasn’t Cuban artillery Flake could have posed with, too.
Pro-Trump Democrats in Ohio may have found Flake hectoring Trump either incomprehensible or downright comical, but the senator who knew he couldn’t be elected to a second term in his own Grand Canyon State sounded more like he was auditioning as a media pundit.
Two RINOS
Constantin Querard, a conservative GOP political consultant in Arizona, told The Wanderer on January 17:
“Flake remains vehemently anti-Trump, and it seems very personal for him. Now that he’s not running for re-election, he does seem to be always auditioning for a post-Senate career on CNN or MSNBC, so defending an obviously biased mainstream media while taking a ludicrous shot at the president seems par for the course.”
Also on January 17, Flake’s mentor and senior Arizona senator, Never Trumper Republican John McCain, delivered his own attack against Trump as a threat to the free press. And, like Flake, McCain claimed Trump’s criticism of U.S. media encourages foreign repression. Not for the first time were the Grand Canyon State’s RINO senators hand-in-hand.
McCain said that whether or not Trump realizes it, his “efforts are being closely watched by foreign leaders who are already using his words as cover as they silence and shutter one of the key pillars of democracy.”
Not that these RINO senators have to worry about dominant media hostility against themselves, neither in Phoenix nor Washington, so no wonder they can’t grasp Trump’s plight.
State Rep. Kelly Townsend, the Arizona House’s majority whip, posted her disagreement with Flake on Facebook, saying: “It cannot be said that President Trump is attacking the true free press. A free press should be reporting facts as they happen and would leave opinion and political posturing to the minds of the listener. Some might say that what we are dealing with now is often flat-out lies and fake news. . . .
“As uncomfortable and crass as it may be, the effort by Donald Trump to restore a true unbiased press is long overdue. We have tried politeness and professionalism and that has gotten us nowhere. It is time to shake things up and demand that the cable networks re-label what it is they deliver to us because they cannot truly call it news,” Townsend said.
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