What a news organization allows to be aired on their network tells you a lot about their priorities. While Fox News kicked off Sunday’s 11:00 a.m. hour with the press conference featuring the heroic Nashville police officers who evacuated people ahead of the Christmas bombing, CNN pressed forward with a prerecorded segment featuring five of their reporters reliving their grievances of the Trump era.
The time slot was the home of both networks’ competing programming dedicated to covering the news media’s antics of the week (MediaBuzz on Fox News and so-called “Reliable Sources” on CNN). And while Fox News host Howard Kurtz pushed back his start time to give way for the officers, CNN went right on ahead with their taped segment with host Brian Stelter.
So, while the officers were talking to the press about what they saw, heard, and did Christmas morning to save lives, Stelter was rehashing CNN’s coverage of the crowd size at President Trump’s inauguration (Click “expand”):
But I want to begin by rewinding four years back to the very beginning. Trump's very first full day in office in January 2017. I know everyone remembers when President Trump freaked out about crowd size at his inauguration. But most people don't know that his fury was triggered by this segment on CNN. It was at 5:19 in the morning on January 21st. Yet, crowd size gate started right here on this network. It was a short accurate report, but it drove Trump up a wall. It was the first sign that his entire presidency will be ruled by what he saw on television.
Following a soundbite of Trump saying he had a “running war with the media,” Stelter bloviated. “Back then, in 2017, media leaders wondered, would he change? Would Trump grow into the role? We know the answer now. Historians one day will write that Trump's conduct deteriorated during his four years in office. He lied more and more dangerously as time went on.”
With him going on to decry Trump calling the press the “enemy of the people” and the “fake news spiral” with Fox News, Stelter eventually started opining about liars:
But people who lie all the time are liars. A reporter who pretends the abnormal is normal, who pretends fiction is fact, that reporter becomes a liar. If I pretend I'm dry in the middle of a soaking rainstorm, then I’m a liar. But this is what causes the fake news spiral. It's a real problem. It was for four years and it's not going away. Trump did damage on this front. And he was proud of the damage he did to media literacy.
Hmm, an interesting analogy he used; talking about standing out in the rain. Shouldn’t that also apply to the reporters who were standing out in burning communities during the Black Lives Matter riots and claimed things were “mostly peaceful?” Aren’t they liars too, Brian?
A few minutes later, Stelter brought on CNN’s pompous chief White House correspondent, Jim Acosta to accuse Trump of wanting to make the United States more like Russia, by having us “drift away from having some semblance of a free and independent press to essentially state-controlled or state-supported media.”
According to him, Fox News and OAN were just “outlets” while “The Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, and major news networks” were “institutions.”
Later whining about Trump taking his press credentials way, Acosta chided conservatives with a warning that a Democratic president could target them in the future (Click “expand”):
And the thing that I warned about the entire time we were covering Donald Trump is, you know, to the conservatives out there who were cheering him on as he was revoking press passes and booting people out of events like what happened with Katelyn and so on. You know, listen, a Democratic president could come in, a Democratic administration could come in and do the very same thing to members of the press that they care about. And so to me, it's just sort of an arms race that we don't need in covering American politics.
Acosta proved he was detached from reality, or intentionally lying. Because Republicans distinctly remember when President Obama tried to have a Fox News reporter (James Rosen) put in prison for reporting leaks and tried to kick the network out of the press pool for not singing his praises.
Further still, White House correspondent Jeremy Diamond lamented how reporters were supposedly the target of a “blood sport” among Trump supporters at rallies. He admitted that he got that impression because they would boo the press.
“Every time any of us attended one of the rallies, there is always that part during the rally where the President points out the press in the back and directs everybody to roundly begin booing and insulting and all kinds of different things towards the press,” he whined.
Yet, the media were partly responsible for stoking the kind of hatred of Trump supporters which resulted in the assault and battery of anyone wearing a red Make America Great Again hat.
Of course, the media’s main priority was themselves. This is CNN.
The transcript is below, click "expand" to read:
CNN’s Reliable Sources
December 27, 2020
11:01:28 a.m. Eastern(…)
BRIAN STELTER: But I want to begin by rewinding four years back to the very beginning. Trump's very first full day in office in January 2017. I know everyone remembers when President Trump freaked out about crowd size at his inauguration. But most people don't know that his fury was triggered by this segment on CNN. It was at 5:19 in the morning on January 21st. Yet, crowd size gate started right here on this network. It was a short accurate report, but it drove Trump up a wall. It was the first sign that his entire presidency will be ruled by what he saw on television.
(…)
STELTER: “A running war with the media.” Back then, in 2017, media leaders wondered, would he change? Would Trump grow into the role? We know the answer now. Historians one day will write that Trump's conduct deteriorated during his four years in office. He lied more and more dangerously as time went on.
But his approach to the media was clear all along. He called major networks like CNN the enemy of the people after just one month in office. And as you can see in this chart from Factbase. He deployed those destructive words more and more often with every passing year.
That's why I call this the fake news spiral. It goes down and down. Just to give an example, a White House correspondent says something that's true, but hard to hear, and then Trump rejects it and then he tells his fans to hate that guy, and then Fox News trashes the guy and then everyone forgets what the real news report was about to begin with. And we end up in a fake news spiral, where the people who need the information most are the ones least receptive to it.
Trump loyalist Matt Schlapp said this to me one day in 2019. Schlapp is the chairman of the American Conservative Union. He said, Brian, “When the media calls our president a liar, they make it impossible for 50 percent of the country to see you as unbiased.”
Maybe so, Matt. But people who lie all the time are liars. A reporter who pretends the abnormal is normal, who pretends fiction is fact, that reporter becomes a liar. If I pretend I'm dry in the middle of a soaking rainstorm, then I’m a liar. But this is what causes the fake news spiral. It's a real problem. It was for four years and it's not going away. Trump did damage on this front. And he was proud of the damage he did to media literacy.
(…)
11:06:32 a.m. Eastern
JIM ACOSTA: And I think what he was trying to accomplish, Brian, is move the United States in the direction of what I describe as state-supported media. We see this happen in other parts of the world where you see countries like Russia, and so on, drift away from having some semblance of a free and independent press to essentially state-controlled or state-supported media.
The President showing preference for outlets like Fox News and OAN and so on, while trying to punish institutions like The Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, and major news networks. I think he was trying to cow the rest of the country into the direction of having either a pro-trump media or an anti-Trump media.
(…)
11:11:38 a.m. Eastern
ACOSTA: And the thing that I warned about the entire time we were covering Donald Trump is, you know, to the conservatives out there who were cheering him on as he was revoking press passes and booting people out of events like what happened with Katelyn and so on. You know, listen, a Democratic president could come in, a Democratic administration could come in and do the very same thing to members of the press that they care about. And so to me, it's just sort of an arms race that we don't need in covering American politics.
(…)
11:13:38 a.m. Eastern
JEREMY DIAMOND: Yeah, there is certainly was a blood sport aspect to it that the President's supporters bought into and relished in seeing. We saw that at the rallies. Every time any of us attended one of the rallies, there is always that part during the rally where the President points out the press in the back and directs everybody to roundly begin booing and insulting and all kinds of different things towards the press. That has become, you know, a normal part of the run of show of a Donald Trump rally.
And I guess the difference is, you know, we saw that during the 2016 campaign. It's just very different once it becomes elevated to the level of the president of the United States.
(…)
