IOW, THEIR APPEAL IS BECOMING MORE SELECTIVE. WAY MORE SELECTIVE:
This stinks: A biased press is mauling Trump’s TV defenders.
Apparently, it’s not just enough to attack President Trump anymore.
The mainstream media are doing their level best to attack anyone defending Trump, too. They’ve got venom to burn, and nowhere was it more obvious than on the Sunday talk shows.
As leftists and anti-Trumpsters glide right through interviews with zero probing, Trump-defenders, in contrast, are getting the third degree.
Just look at how bad it was over the weekend. Here’s a list.
Start with 60 Minutes, which featured two anti-Trump Democrats and one pro-Trump Republican, stacking the airtime for the Left. “I always said, we will follow the facts where they take us,” House speaker Nancy Pelosi claimed, in dramatic, grave, rehearsed tones to 60 Minutes‘ Scott Pelley, claiming she wanted the whole impeachment show to be “a unifying experience” despite doing the exact opposite. Video here. Pelley didn’t do any probing on that colossal phoniness, despite House minority leader Kevin McCarthy pointing out accurately later (around the 6:16 point in the video) that Pelosi started her impeachment inquiry well before she had President Trump’s transcript in her hands. Nor was Pelosi (nor was House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff, who also got interviewed) asked about the weird little rules change about whistleblowers not needing any firsthand knowledge to file politically motivated complaints, which occurred just days before the whistleblower report came out (almost as if the rules change had been planned that way) and whether that might mean a setup. She also wasn’t asked about the problem of Joe Biden’s sale of public office in the $50,000-a-month payout from a foreign energy company for the “services” of his drug-addled and otherwise unemployable son. “No evidence Hunter did anything illegal,” Pelley noted, delicately explaining it as a mere “appearance of conflict of interest,” if that. Nor was Pelosi asked about what Trump really meant in attempting to get to the bottom of Biden’s own collusion with foreigners, which was tied to the 2016 Russia collusion investigation. Pelosi also should have been asked about House Democrats’ letters asking the Ukrainians to investigate Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and how that might be at all different from Trump asking the Ukrainians to throw some sunlight on Biden’s dealings. Softball? Off easy? Double standard? You decide.
By contrast, McCarthy got the third degree from Pelley, and to be fair, McCarthy did seem to keep begging Pelley’s questions, and he made a minor error on the transcript, which didn’t help his case. However, the interview was choppy. That suggests there may have been some editing done, big editing, taking out all the parts where McCarthy could have been effectively defending Trump. Bottom line: He got mauled.
That wasn’t the only instance of bias in the press.
CBS’s Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan gave Sen. Lindsey Graham, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, about the same treatment in this video here, starting with the “debunked server” issue. Graham argues well that people need to vote Trump out if they think Trump did something wrong, something Brennan knew wasn’t part of the narrative, so she changed the subject. “Do you think it’s ethical to bring up Joe Biden?” she asked. Graham answered a fierce yes, saying there was a corruption scandal that needed to be gotten to the bottom of. “It smells to high heaven,” said Graham, calling the whole thing “a political setup” and a “sham,” wanting to know about the whistleblower’s bias, the sudden rules change on whistleblowers, and other problems. Brennan changed the subject and said the transcript and whistleblower complaint “matched” and added, “I think this thing stinks.” Graham was effective, and every time he made a good point, the subject got changed.
Meanwhile, NeverTrump Fox News host Chris Wallace mauled White House senior adviser Stephen Miller in savage beast mode. Video here and here. Miller tried to point out the backstory of Joe Biden’s underlying corruption — using public office to line his son’s pockets and doing some real quid pro quo of politically muscling Ukraine to fire its investigator of the Biden sweetheart deal as reason for Trump attempting to get the Ukrainians to investigate the matter. Instead of listen to that, Wallace got hostile, wanting to know about the utterly irrelevant Rudy Giuliani angle from Miller, saying: “I asked you a specific question and want a specific answer,” and as Miller tried to answer, Wallace interrupted, sharply shouting, “Answer my question!” while poor low-key Miller couldn’t get a word in edgewise. A particularly nasty mauling. So much for “civility.”
Hitting Miller wasn’t enough for Wallace, by the way; he even attacked Trump-supporters who weren’t there. Trump-friendly attorney Victoria Toensing tweeted that Wallace made an utterly false statement about her role in the Ukraine dealings, and she bit back here.
Another Fox News host, Ed Henry, attacked Trump-friendly radio host Mark Levin. Politico has the flavor of that one and Levin speaks well for the problem:
At one point, Henry asked Levin if he thought the president had broken the law. “What crime was violated?” Levin said. “It’s not illegal. The question is whether Biden did something illegal. The president didn’t do anything illegal.” When Henry circled back to the question, Levin replied: “Your question is not honest.”
Bottom line: the mauling pattern holds.
Then there was CNN’s Jake Tapper and GOP House ranking member of the Oversight Committee, Jim Jordan. (Video here). Tapper spent time arguing with Jordan about whether the whistleblower was partisan, a fact that was pretty well right there in the Attorney General’s report. Tapper wanted to fight about that instead of learn anything new. Jordan did manage to smack Tapper back pretty well, and Tapper tried to point out that Republicans were hypocrites about this, changing the subject. He pleaded for Tapper to look at the transcript, but to no avail. Tapper then wanted to argue about the rules change on firsthand knowledge from the whistleblower. Jordan tried to also argue that the firsthand sources contradicted the whistleblower’s report, including statements from the president of Ukraine. Jordan also talked of leaks of presidential conversations as reason for placing the transcripts on the secure server “I recognize you don’t want the facts coming out” Tapper replied. Jordan got ignored – and mauled.
Lastly, there was Rudy Giuliani. He made a string of interviews and complained about the double standards of pro- and anti-Trump guests to George Stephanopoulos. He also complained about interruptions, which have been pretty pervasive across the scale. Much ink has been spilled on how Giuliani’s wild Trumpian-style defenses of President Trump (must be a New York thang) wasn’t helping Trump’s case, and he ought to be off the air. The Joe Biden team, however, is now lobbying the press to keep Giuliani off the air, which rather suggests he thinks Giuliani is helping Trump. Guess who the media intends to listen to?
What are we looking at with this mass media effort to silence not just Trump but Trump’s defenders? It’s astonishing how strong the double standards are, and some of the maulings were quite egregious.
In short, a ‘narrative’ is being created, with conservatives silenced and muzzled, and leftists skating. This is how we get ‘narratives,’ and it’s pretty clear the classic Obama-era narrative-making is now in action. Any questions as to why at least half the public despises the mainstream media? Democratic operatives with bylines means pro-Trump Republicans have almost as many obstacles to being heard as President Trump does. To repeat what Graham says: ‘It stinks.’
h/t SH