Double Standards
In a jaw-dropping display that was one part a lack of self-awareness and another part hypocrisy, Wednesday’s prime-time Anderson Cooper 360 featured a panel of CNN analysts sharing their opinions about opinion shows like Hannity on Fox News. Their opinions varied but were largely against the mixing of opinion and news. And that was their opinion on the news of the day. The hypocrisy was so thick you could cut it with a knife.
New York Times media reporters Michael Grynbaum and John Koblin doubled down on hypocritical double standards on disclosure, criticizing Fox News host and commentator Sean Hannity for his undisclosed client relationship with Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, while letting NBC News host Chuck Todd throw stones at Hannity from his crystal perch, in “No Disclosure, but No Punishment, as Hannity Gets ‘Full Support’ From Fox.” The online headline was snarkier: “No Disclosure? No Problem. Sean Hannity Gets a Pass at Fox News.”
It turns out that Rachel Maddow's speculation, articulated twice on Friday, that President Donald Trump ordered air strikes in Syria "because of scandal" is not limited at MSBNC to one far-left host. It's a perceived, widely-shared likelihood which has frequently been tied to Wag the Dog, a movie which appeared just before the late-1990s Clinton-Lewinsky scandal broke.
Mere seconds after ABC wrapped up their Sunday night broadcast of its exclusive interview with former FBI Director James Comey, CNN began its so-called “Special Report” in which they mostly gushed about what it meant for him to trash Trump like that. While they did have some criticisms (which largely centered on his handling of the Clinton investigation), the stacked liberal panel sang Comey’s praises for speaking out against the President.
The press has clearly chosen to downplay the Inspector General's damning Friday report on the conduct leading to former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe's dismissal. The worst such example was a grudging Saturday item at the Associated Press.
On Friday, shortly after President Donald Trump's announcement of air strikes against Syria, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow twice put on her tinfoil hat, alleging that there is a "perception that the president may have ordered these strikes in part because of scandal," and that Trump's decision "may have ... (been) inflected by the scandals surrounding him." Maddow even contended that this alleged perception of scandal-driven decision-making will "affect the impact and the effectiveness of these military strikes."
A one-sided Wednesday report at CBS News tried to convince readers that University of Tennessee-Chattanooga student Brenna Spencer's "I don't take normal graduation photos" tweet picturing her with a firearm generated significant "backlash." To create a false impression, the network cited critical tweets from two users with a combined eight Twitter followers, ignoring far more significant support Spencer received, including two Second Amendment-supporting women with a combined 160,000 followers.
In the aftermath of House Speaker Paul Ryan's announcement that he will retire from Congress, amid the speculation about who might replace him as top Republican in the House, the Washington Post ran an AP story by Alan Fram which repeats the debunked claims that House Majority Whip Steve Scalise was a speaker for a David Duke-founded white supremacist group without even acknowledging any of the evidence that he was not. In fact, at this point, in spite of media silence, there's more evidence that prominent Democrats have directly associated with Louis Farrakhan than there is that Scalise was ever connected to Duke.
It was a tale of two protests. After a school walkout against gun violence in March, students across the country organized a pro-life walkout in support of the unborn and pregnant and parenting students. But the networks only covered one of them.
The mainstream media’s contempt for “Trump’s favorite network” Fox News, and especially the morning show Fox & Friends, continues apace. A particularly virulent and condescending example is Charles Blow’s Monday column for the New York Times, “Horror of Being Governed by ‘Fox & Friends.’” Blow spewed: "America is being governed by the dimmest of wits on the most unscrupulous of networks. The very thought of it is horror-inducing."
With the National Guard on its way to the U.S.-Mexico border to aid Border Patrol, CNN’s Brian Stelter kicked off Reliable Sources on Sunday by suggesting that Fox News had a hand in their deployment. According to him, Fox and Friends fed President Trump a steady diet of misleading reports that got him to send in the troops. Yet, Stelter and his panel never explained what was wrong with the reports and they even noted other outlets reported the same thing.
For this installment of if the parties were reversed, the Thursday evening and Friday morning broadcast network newscasts refused to cover possible 2020 presidential candidate and Democratic Senator Kamala Harris (Calif.) joking on The Ellen Show about killing President Trump, Vice President Pence, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The Fox News Channel’s Hannity naturally covered it, but the other mention of this sick joke was MSNBC’s First Look, which airs in the 5:00 a.m. Eastern hour prior to Morning Joe.