In the Unintentionally Hilarious Department, CNN's Chris Cillizza tried to deconstruct President Trump's tweet on Wednesday about the latest Media Research Center study finding (once again) the tone of his evening-news coverage is 90 percent negative. First, like most liberals, he dismisses any importance to the idea that 90-percent negative coverage in pretty much every month of the year demonstrates an animus:
Put aside the authoritarian -- but ultimately empty -- threat about taking away the media's "credentials," and focus instead on this sentence: "91% of the Network News about me is negative (Fake)."
Trump, I think, is referring to a 2017 study by the conservative Media Research Center which claimed that 91% of the nightly news coverage on the president was negative.
But, that's not (really) the point here. The point can be summed up in these two words from Trump: "negative (Fake)."
Negative and fake are not the same. But as a long-time political handicapper, Cillizza knows Trump is mocking the media for spending the entire 2016 cycle routinely suggesting he was completely unelectable. That perpetual prediction -- and all the hours of air time carrying it -- was....false.
Somehow it's not (really) the point that CNN and the others hate Donald Trump so much they can't see straight. For example, Cillizza thinks he brought good old-fashioned objective journalism in January to the subject of Trump and exercise:
So. To summarize Trump's exercise regimen:
1. Walking
2. This
3. That
4. Run to building next door
5. Unspecified number of repetitions
Wow, that is real "Facts First" journalism. Cillizza "reported" that the president "exercises strenuously roughly zero times a week -- unless you count the time he spends golfing. But, Trump doesn't even like to get too much exercise on the golf course -- choosing to ride in a cart rather than walk the course."
So why would people believe the media mock him? Cillizza and others think Trump's tweets are the problem, and can't look at their own entrenched liberalism:
Here's the problem: Trump's attacks on the media -- as flawed and dishonest as they are -- are working. More than 4 in 10 people in a Gallup poll earlier this year could not name a single objective news source. Almost eight in 10 (77%) in a Monmouth University poll released last month said TV and print media report "fake news." That's a 14-point bump from the number of people who said the same last year.
The media is not blameless in all of this. As I noted above, we do make mistakes. We have made major strides in transparency but need to do even more to show our work to people. The more open we are about how we do our jobs, the better chance we have of convincing people that our most basic commitment is to getting stories right, not pushing some sort of imagined ideological agenda.
Liberal bias is "Fake News," Cillizza insists. Liberal bias is imaginary, like a unicorn. Everyone who watches CNN knows better.
