Scott Whitlock
Latest from Scott Whitlock
As Americans go from store to store, hunting for available toilet paper during the Coronavirus crisis, it occurred to us here at NewsBusters, that this isn’t the first time TP has become a major media topic. Back in the spring of 2007, liberal singer Sheryl Crow floated the idea of a self-imposed toilet paper limitation. During a global warming college tour, Crow offered up this disturbing idea to college students:
ABC News and The Washington Post responded to strong approval numbers for Donald Trump’s handling of the Corona crisis by warning that it will “reinforce” his own beliefs. Both outlets, in a joint poll, suggested the result could be nothing more than a patriotic rallying from the country.
If you believe the smears of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, the Trump administration is just about to release a Coronavirus policy allowing for the mass death of the elderly population. Of course, that’s not actually happening, but it didn’t stop Joe Scarborough from sliming conservatives and Republicans as bloodthirsty monsters.
Unlike the friendly, compliant Andrea Mitchell, CNN (of all networks) actually questioned Nancy Pelosi’s botched efforts to get election reform and climate change legislation into the Coronavirus stimulus package. Perhaps Pelosi’s attempted spin was too much even for Dana Bash. On Tuesday, she told the CNN host: “Everything we are suggesting just relates to COVID-19.” Bash reminded, “I'm sure you heard the Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on the Senate floor today… saying that what you and the House have been asking for, and maybe even some Democrats in the Senate are, you know, things on your wish.”
It’s good to be a Democrat running for president on ABC's The View. The combative, liberal women are prone to interrupt and attack if a Republican presidential candidate comes on. But Joe Biden appeared on Tuesday for a friendly, gushing interview that lasted 24 minutes and 41 seconds. He faced almost no tough questions and talked for minutes on end without an interruption.
CBS This Morning on Tuesday mostly ignored the findings of its own poll on the coronavirus and the government’s handling of it. The network allowed a scant 10 seconds to the news that a majority, 53 percent, approve of the President’s response. Relegated to online is the news that more Americans trust Donald Trump to given information than the media itself.
Get ready to hear a lot of this from the hard left in the media: According to MSNBC host Chris Hayes, conservatives, Republicans and Donald Trump are ready to kill a “million” senior citizens as a way of saving the economy from the coronavirus. Hayes opened his All In show by comparing it to similar “right wing ideas,” such as being okay with air pollution, even if it kills people with lung disease.
Meet the Press anchor Chuck Todd continued his Corona crisis feud with Donald Trump on Sunday, deriding the President as “panicked” and a “one step backward instigator” when it comes to the virus. Appearing on the Today show, the NBC journalist opined, “I think he just wants to be seen as the one leading the response. I think that's why he's gravitated to these. But at the end of the day, the federal response feels like it's two steps forward and then the President participates and he's a singular one step backward instigator.”
Despite the overwhelmingly hostile, transparently liberal tone of the mainstream media, some journalists still try and deny what it obvious to most everyone. NBC and MSNBC host Chuck Todd did just that five years ago this week. Appearing on the March 18, 2015 edition of The Mike O’Meara Show, O’Meara asked if the Meet the Press host “gets any blowback from political leaders about the point of view” of the show.
After a contentious White House briefing in which NBC reporter Peter Alexander derided the President for “giving Americans false hope,” Meet the Press anchor Chuck Todd on Friday darkly warned that the “pressure” might be “getting to” Donald Trump. During the briefing, Alexander demanded, “Is it possible that your impulse to put a positive spin on things may be giving Americans a false sense of hope by misrepresenting the preparedness right now?” Using the attack question as proof, Todd later asked Alexander, “Is the pressure getting to the President here? He seems very defensive.”
Brian Williams is angry at “freaky” Fox News, deriding the network for thinking we’re all “stupid.” The MSNBC late night host, a man who lost his NBC job for lying, on Thursday night attacked Fox for not being honest in its past coverage of the Coronavirus. Talking to Michael Steele, Williams ranted, “The other attempt to tell us what we ourselves saw and heard or did not see and hear really has, at its core assumption, that we must be stupid.”
Socialist MSNBC anchor Lawrence O’Donnell on Wednesday night kicked off his prime time show by snarling that competitor Fox News is “endangering your life” with Coronavirus “lies.” The Last Word host, who has himself politicized the virus, insisted that “Fox now takes the pandemic seriously.” But “the sudden switch to taking the pandemic seriously at Fox proves that Fox was lying about it deliberately for weeks and weeks when they were lying in the way they believed Donald Trump wanted them to lie.”
Talk about tone deaf. CBS This Morning on Thursday attempted to report the upside to a global pandemic that is killing thousands. Correspondent Vladimir Duthiers, reporting from his home because of the virus, cheered, “Let's talk to you about Italy. Obviously that country, its people have been devastated by the coronavirus. But there is a little bit of a silver lining in some of its historic cities. This is Venice. For the first time, you guys have been to Venice, you can never see the waters because they're so murky from all the boats.”
Even when journalists are supposedly focusing on the growing Coronavirus health crisis, the 2020 campaign is never far from their mind. Case in point on Wednesday, CBS This Morning co-host Gayle King hijacked a discussion on COVID-19 to talk about censoring political speech. Such was the case when King scored an exclusive interview with Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg.
As they offer grudging agreement that the President has been handling more recent responses to the Coronavirus crisis well, the journalists at CNN don’t seem to quite know what to do with themselves. On Monday night, liberal host Don Lemon brought on network fact checker Daniel Dale for a response to Donald Trump.
Does it make sense for liberal CNN host Chris Cuomo to interview his liberal Democrat brother, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, on the network’s prime time line-up? According to the network, it’s the perfect place for two members of a prominent Democrat family to bash the Republican president.
Never let a crisis go to waste. That’s clearly a motto embraced by MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell. As the nation fights to deal with the Coronavirus pandemic sweeping the globe, O’Donnell on Sunday lectured that more will die if ObamaCare is fully repealed. After the Democratic debate ended, the Last Word host talked to former Obama administration official, Dr. Kavita Patel. She attacked, “Donald Trump has dismantled the Affordable Care Act.”
CNN on Sunday continued the network’s efforts to politicize the coronavirus and blame Donald Trump. Fareed Zakaria trashed the President for “emulating” the “propaganda” of North Korea. Opening his Fareed Zakaria GPS show, the anchor hammered, “This crisis seems to have been designed to bring out the worst of Trump. The President doesn't like or trust experts, often explaining that he knows more than they do. He has bluffed and fibbed his way through much of his life.”
Bernie Sanders has been on the national stage for almost 30 years and his relationship with the media has fluctuated. Sometimes, journalists view him as a threat, a candidate that would surely lose to Donald Trump and must be stopped. Other times, his socialist views are exciting and captivating for these reporters. But if you go back to November 11, 1990, you can see that World News Tonight found the then-Congressman-elect to be fascinating and worthy of attention. Reporter Bob Jamieson told viewers that the socialist was “no fringe politician.”
Donald Trump declared a state of emergency on Friday at a White House press conference detailing the ongoing efforts to combat the Coronavirus. After speaking and sharing the stage with doctors and leaders in the economy, CBS News journalist Weijia Jiang wondered if the President was being “selfish” for not immediately taking a COVID-19 test.