by Sean Hannity
We saw this play out in the media’s adoring coverage of the Obama administration. For instance, after Obama halted America’s “wet foot, dry foot” policy, which had permitted Cuban refugees who reached our shores to enter the country, the next morning the three major broadcast networks spent a scant sixty-eight seconds covering the story. But when Trump issued an executive order temporarily banning immigration from several Middle Eastern and African countries, they spent sixty-four minutes on the news. As NewsBusters noted, “The coverage of Trump’s executive order has been overwhelmingly negative, with NBC’s Today even suggesting a link between Trump’s immigration ban and a mass shooting at a mosque in Quebec, despite a complete lack of evidence.”10
There you go—when Obama blocks refugees, it’s a nonstory. When Trump does it, it’s a form of mass murder.
THE MEDIA’S LOVE AFFAIR WITH OBAMA
To fully understand media bias, it’s useful to reflect on media coverage of the Obama administration. The media literally deified Obama, often depicting him adorned with a halo. Magazine covers idolized him as “God of All Things,” and “The Second Coming.”11 Newsweek editor Evan Thomas marveled, “In a way Obama is standing above the country, above the world. He’s a sort of God. He’s going to bring all different sides together.”12 Barbara Walters said “we” thought Obama was “the next Messiah.”13 SF Gate columnist Mark Morford was even more over-the-top: “Barack Obama isn’t really one of us. Not in the normal way, anyway…. It’s not merely his youthful vigor, or handsomeness, or even inspiring rhetoric. It is not fresh ideas or cool charisma or the fact that a black president will be historic and revolutionary in about a thousand different ways. It is something more. Even Bill Clinton, with all his effortless, winking charm, didn’t have what Obama has, which is a sort of powerful luminosity, a unique high-vibration integrity… that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment.”14 Chris Matthews famously took his fawning in a more obscene direction. “I have to tell you,” he gushed, “…the feeling most people get when they hear Barack Obama’s speech. My, I felt this thrill going up my leg. I mean, I don’t have that too often.”15
Of course, the entire idea that Obama was some transcendent uniter was a fantasy manufactured by the press itself. As I pointed out at the time, Obama was partisan, divisive, and radical, he vilified his opponents, and he went into snits when things didn’t go his way. He had thin skin and repeatedly singled me out by name as his administration tried to sideline Fox News, the one network that didn’t believe he walked on water. But he was the media’s long-awaited liberal savior, so they protected him at every turn.
The media were even complicit in the Obama administration’s scapegoating of an obscure producer of an internet video, who was blamed for the 2012 attack on our embassy in Benghazi. The media dutifully echoed the administration’s false claim that the attack began as a protest against an anti-Islamic video, whose producer was promptly arrested in America, when in fact it was a preplanned assault by al Qaeda–linked terrorists.16 The Obama administration, however, had been bragging about its victories over al Qaeda, so it was inconvenient for al Qaeda to sack our embassy and murder four Americans, including an ambassador. “This unsavory relationship between the media and the Democrats has long existed, but the political career of Barack Obama marks a quantum leap beyond the media’s traditional liberal preferences and biases—which in the past had at least a patina of objectivity and neutrality—to blatant advocacy, double standards, and explicit partisan hatred,” Thornton commented at the time.17
The media was so subservient to Obama that his “foreign policy guru” and speechwriter, Ben Rhodes, bragged that he had led them by the nose to do the administration’s bidding. During negotiations for the Iran nuclear deal, as with other important events, Rhodes coordinated policy, politics, and messaging for the administration. New York Times Magazine’s David Samuels admitted, “The way in which most Americans have heard the story… was largely manufactured for the purpose of selling the deal.”18 They sold it as Obama seizing the opportunity to make a deal with newly empowered Iranian moderates to dismantle the mullahs’ nuclear weapons program. But in fact Obama had been “eager to do a deal with Iran as far back as 2012, and even since the beginning of his presidency,” as part of his wider foreign policy vision.19
To push their false narrative, the administration set up a “war room” inside the White House quarterbacked by Rhodes, which operated as “the nerve center for the selling of the Iran deal to Congress.”20 They mounted a sophisticated operation to spread their message online. “By applying 21st-century data and networking tools to the white-glove world of foreign affairs, the White House was able to track what United States senators and the people who worked for them, and influenced them, were seeing online—and make sure that no potential negative comment passed without a tweet,” wrote Samuels.
As this plan played out, “legions of arms-control experts began popping up at think tanks and on social media, and then became key sources for hundreds of often-clueless reporters. ‘We created an echo chamber,’ ” said Rhodes. “ ‘They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.’ ”21 Rhodes admitted he was scared by the prospect of such an elaborate spin campaign being run by some other administration, but that didn’t seem to bother him. “I mean, I’d prefer a sober, reasoned public debate, after which members of Congress reflect and take a vote,” said Rhodes. “But that’s impossible.”22
The main thing I want you to take away from this is not that Obama and his inner circle were deceitful and manipulative, though they absolutely were. What is most striking is the casual treatment of this saga by the New York Times—its reaction, through Samuels’s story, of adulation rather than disgust at being deceived and manipulated by Obama. The media were so enamored of Obama’s progressive staffers that they appeared grateful for the honor of being duped by them. There was no outrage from the mainstream media and no demands for Rhodes’s head.
Obama’s lackeys sold Obamacare in a similarly dishonest way. Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Jonathan Gruber, Obamacare’s principal architect, openly bragged about deceiving the American people by writing the Obamacare law “in a tortured way” to ensure favorable scoring from the Congressional Budget Office. Gruber essentially admitted the public would have rejected Obamacare had it been properly understood. “Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage,” said Gruber. “And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical for the thing to pass.”23 Again, there was no indignation from the mainstream media, whose entire reason for being is supposed to be preventing this kind of fraud from being perpetrated on the American people.
Remember these examples the next time you hear the Fake News Media whining about Trump’s treatment of the press. The hate-Trump media don’t care about keeping government officials honest; their primary concern is advancing the left’s agenda, and they’ll hype, bury, or skew their stories accordingly.
TAKING AIM AT CANDIDATE TRUMP
The media’s fawning coverage of Obama could not stand in starker contrast to the daily beatings they meted out to Donald Trump throughout his campaign. They’ve been obsessed with the man since June 16, 2015, when he descended the escalator at Trump Tower in New York City to formally announce his candidacy. Having quickly decided that he’s a racist, the media were noticeably excited when former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke endorsed him. When Trump was asked about this, he said he didn’t know anything about Duke, his endorsement, or white supremacists. This simple and straightforward answer sparked a media frenzy. The Daily Beast’s headline was typical of the hysterical coverage: “Trump won’t denounce KKK support.”24 Meanwhile, they didn’t show the slightest conce
rn about Obama’s documented ties to domestic terrorist Bill Ayers.
The media mob’s different treatment of the 2016 Republican and Democrat conventions is another damning indictment of their bias. The Media Research Center found that journalists described the Republican convention negatively twelve times more often than its Democratic counterpart. Most media reactions to Democratic speakers were positive and “often enthusiastic.” There was also a marked difference in the amount of airtime they gave leaders of the opposing party during the respective conventions—Democratic figures received far more time to comment during the Republican convention than Republicans were given to sound off during the Democratic convention.25
During the campaign, the New York Times’ Jim Rutenberg made a shocking plea for reporters to abandon journalistic standards when covering Trump. In an August 7, 2016, column he asked how “a working journalist” was supposed to cover candidate Trump, “a demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalistic tendencies.” If you believe that, he said, “you have to throw out the textbook American journalism has been using for the better part of the past half-century, if not longer, and approach it in a way you’ve never approached anything in your career…. If you view a Trump presidency as something that’s potentially dangerous, then your reporting is going to reflect that. You would move closer than you’ve ever been to being oppositional.” He admitted that covering Trump as abnormal and potentially dangerous “upsets balance, that idealistic form of journalism with a capital ‘J’ we’ve been trained to always strive for. But let’s face it: Balance has been on vacation since Mr. Trump stepped onto his golden Trump Tower escalator last year to announce his candidacy.”26 Typical of leftists, Rutenberg was arguing that their noble ends (defeating Trump) justify terrible means (eviscerating journalistic standards).
How would these corrupt hacks feel about conservatives arguing that normal journalistic standards shouldn’t have applied to covering President Obama because his ideas are dangerous to the republic? Who’s to say which president is more “dangerous”? It used to be journalists’ job to report the facts and let the American people decide those kinds of questions. Now they’re convinced the people can’t be trusted to make the “right” decision.
As the media played up Trump’s alleged vileness on the campaign trail, they played down his chances of winning. An October 18, 2016, article by Stuart Rothenberg in the Washington Post, which was not designated as an opinion piece, was brazenly headlined, “Trump’s Path to an Electoral College Victory Isn’t Narrow. It’s Nonexistent.” He insisted that Trump “trails badly with only a few weeks to go until Nov. 8, and he must broaden his appeal to have any chance of winning. That is now impossible.”27 Rothenberg called Trump “a disaster as a presidential nominee” and “his own worst enemy,” and cemented his place in history as the world’s worst political analyst by including this line: “Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, once part of the Trump scenario, have never been ‘in play.’ ”28
With just three weeks to go until the election, Trump had not received a single major newspaper endorsement, according to the Media Research Center, while sixty-eight papers had endorsed Clinton.29 Despite Trump supposedly having no shot at winning, however, an MRC study showed that in the twelve weeks following the party conventions, the media devoted substantially more airtime to Trump than Clinton—and 91 percent of it was “hostile.”30
The media arrogantly assumed they were pulling Trump’s strings—forcing him to the front of the Republican primaries while believing he didn’t have a chance to win the general election. But it turns out that Trump understands the media better than they understand themselves. In fact, Trump was manipulating them, enticing them to cover him whether they wanted to or not.
Politico’s Jack Shafer figured it out, noting that Trump shrewdly ran “a media campaign directly against the media, helping himself to the copious media attention available to a TV star while disparaging journalists at every podium and venue.” Other presidents had attacked the media, said Shafer, but Trump baited them at a whole new level, running against them even more than he was against Hillary Clinton and ceaselessly hammering their pro-Clinton bias. “The most powerful weapon deployed by the Clintons is the corporate media,” said Trump. “The reporters collaborate and conspire directly with the Clinton campaign on helping her win the election all over.” By suckering the media mobs into covering him even while he was attacking them, noted Shafer, Trump could operate a lean campaign, ignoring “all the orthodoxies, eschewing the traditional campaign-building, almost ignoring the field offices and a ‘ground game.’ By April [2016] his campaign had only 94 payrolled staffers compared to Hillary Clinton’s 795.”31
RealClear Media fellow Kalev Leetaru observed that the press devoted so much attention to Trump that in some ways it helped revive American journalism.32 “In the end, for media outlets that spend so much of their time attacking Trump, it is clear that they simply cannot live without him,” wrote Leetaru. CNN full-time Trump, Hannity, and FNC hater and Jeff Zucker stenographer—or as I affectionately call him, Humpty Dumpty—Brian Stelter made a similar admission. “Trump is the media’s addiction,” said Stelter. “When he speaks, he is given something no other candidate gets. That’s wall-to-wall coverage here on cable news. He sucks up all the oxygen.”33
Regardless of which was the tail and which the dog, the spotlight was on Trump—constantly—and the attention legitimized his candidacy even though most of it was openly hostile. “Donald Trump’s surge to the front of the GOP presidential polls has occasioned not a little media attention and endless speculation as to why,” wrote George Washington University political science professor John Sides. “The answer is simple: Trump is surging in the polls because the news media has consistently focused on him since he announced his candidacy on June 16.”34
The professor’s view was common on the left. It was comforting for them to attribute Trump’s popularity solely to the media attention. That allowed them to avoid acknowledging that his positions—cracking down on illegal immigration, renegotiating unfavorable trade deals, and reviving American manufacturing, to name a few—were finding widespread support. “It is tempting to attribute Mr. Trump’s surge to something more than media coverage, to assume that his positions must have unusual resonance with Republicans voters, or to infer that Republicans are clamoring for an anti-immigration candidate,” wrote New York Times political analyst Nate Cohn. “Those factors do play a role, but the predominant force is extraordinary and sustained media coverage.”35
So the media played a tortured role in the 2016 campaign. They posed as guardians of the public trust warning us of Trump’s evils, yet by their own account they played a key role—in fact, the key role—in promoting his campaign. Once he rode this notoriety all the way to the White House, one would think the media would do a bit of self-reflection and cover him differently in order to stop inadvertently helping him. But that didn’t happen. Their obsession with Trump is so deep that they’re simply incapable of reporting on him fairly and reasonably, even when they know he thrives on their delirious hatred.
PEAK FAKE NEWS: THE MEDIA AND THE TRUMP PRESIDENCY
It’s hard to imagine a more acute form of media bias than Trump Derangement Syndrome/Psychosis. After Trump won election, the Washington Post welcomed our new president by adopting the official motto “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” “We thought it would be a good, concise value statement that conveys who we are to the many millions of readers who have come to us for the first time over the last year,” said the paper’s spokeswoman. The Post insisted that the motto has nothing to do with Trump,36 laughably, given that it was adopted just one month after he took office. With its anti-Trump coverage, you see, the Post is saving democracy from the Trumpian “darkness.” A tweet from The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway captured the absurdity: “I thought people were joking about this new WP motto: ‘democracy dies in darkness.’ They were not. I shouldn’t be laughing
so hard.”37
The Pew Research Center analyzed the media’s coverage of Trump’s first sixty days and found it was far more biased than it was for the three preceding presidents. The Trump coverage was 62 percent negative, compared to 20 percent negative for Barack Obama and 28 percent for both George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Only 5 percent of the Trump coverage was positive versus 42 percent positive for Obama, 22 percent for Bush, and 27 percent for Clinton.38 “And it’s not a case of overwhelmingly negative coverage on one subject drowning out some moderately positive coverage on other matters,” wrote blogger Allahpundit about the media’s Trump reporting. “It was resoundingly negative across the board.”39
The Democrats and the media will weaponize almost any news story to demonize Trump. Consider two shooting incidents, one in El Paso by a white supremacist and another in Dayton by a socialist. The media used the El Paso shooting to smear Trump as a white nationalist and connect him to the shooting of more than twenty innocent people, with the New York Times claiming the shooter’s manifesto “echoes” Trump’s language. Meanwhile, the Dayton shooter’s ideology was downplayed and ignored, including his expressed support for Elizabeth Warren and his rants about “concentration camps” at the border that mimic the rhetoric of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other Democrats.40 And of course, you’d have to look a long time before finding a mainstream news article blaming Bernie Sanders because a fan of his shot up a Republican softball practice, wounding Congressman Steve Scalise—nearly mortally—and three others.
The media doesn’t just portray Trump as a white supremacist; it routinely describes his everyday supporters the same way. Their smearing of Nick Sandmann and his fellow Covington High School students who attended a March for Life rally in Washington, D.C., was a prime example. Without any facts, the media castigated the students, getting almost everything wrong in their stories and never apologizing when their lies were uncovered. They described the students as mocking and mistreating an elderly Native American who, as it turns out, was the aggressor in a confrontation with the Covington students. A video of the event exonerated the students and exposed the media’s lies. A sampling of the media mob’s slanderous coverage of the incident: “Boys in ‘Make America Great Again’ Hats Mob Native Elder at Indigenous People’s March,” said the New York Times; “The Catholic Church’s Shameful History of Native American Abuses,” declared the Washington Post. “Covington Catholic High School students surrounded, intimidated and chanted over Native Americans singing about indigenous people’s strength and spirit,” read the lead paragraph in a piece from the Cincinnati Enquirer.41 Lin Wood, who is representing Sandmann, will likely make the kid a billionaire due to all the lies and slander told about him by major media outlets. CNN has already had to settle for an undisclosed amount. 42