There's a debate within the liberal media over the latest hot tweets from President Trump that strangely suggested American-born leftist legislators go "home" to fix their own countries and then come back and show us how to fix our country.
On his Sunday morning show, Reliable Sources host Brian Stelter acknowledged that Trump's insistence that people "go home" to their own terrible countries -- without naming any names -- would seem to apply to Rep. Ilhan Omar, who was born in Somalia. But it's definitely odd if Trump was referring to American-born legislators like Omar's other friends in "The Squad."
Then in his daily newsletter late on Sunday night, CNN host Brian Stelter demanded Trump's tweets be described "accurately" as "racist." He praised his own network for "call[ing] out this example of racism emanating from the highest office in the land in an authoritative, institutional voice." CNN hammered away at the "racist tweets" line all day long on Monday, including headlines (and chyrons) insisting "Trump denies racist tweets were racist."
Question: Does CNN have an "authoritative" voice when it gets out its rhetorical brass knuckles? Or is it losing the notion they are a Cable "News" Network? Stelter recently admitted to Ezra Klein that "cable news is primarily a 24/7 talk show about politics and other stories." But he cannot imagine that some people watch them swing away and say "wow, those people are emotionally invested in shouting down this guy." This is the Jim Acosta School of Journalism.
Stelter attacked his liberal colleagues at the broadcast networks for sounding more disinterested: "many" or "Democrats" were "calling it racist." He was pressuring people to bend to the notion that Trump's racism was a fact, and not an opinion. He cited New York Times television critic James Poniewozik, who insisted the R-word must be employed: "if they avoid it, they avoid their job, which is to accurately represent to their audience what's happening."
"Doing your job" is denouncing Trump in the strongest terms. Uncorking the Two Minutes Hate is professionalism.
Stelter began his Sunday show with a typical rant about how Trump is so racist that he's upset that people aren't more valiantly resisting "straight-up racism," which is enabled by conservatives:
BRIAN STELTER: These smears, these lies, this misinformation that comes mostly on the right from pro-Trump websites, Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, supported by television hosts, radio hosts, they are softening the ground for straight-up racism out of the president's Twitter account....
It's 2019. We're two and a half years into the Trump presidency and his racism is becoming more obvious, more frightening. There are millions of Americans who knows what he means when he says go back to where you came from. They have heard those words in the school yard, behind their backs at work. That kind of racism that Americans have been fighting against for decades is coming from the president's Twitter feed. There's no bigger story in the country right now.
But guess what? These tweets don't have to be the biggest story. This is what they desperately feel should be the biggest story, because they hate Trump so much. Stelter and his destroy-Trump allies are doing a dreadful job of explaining what far-left Democrats actually said -- presumably at the far-left Netroots Nation conference -- that spurred Trump to tweet. "Netroots what?"
As Bill D'Agostino noted, CNN somehow can't bring its "authoritative" voice to a radical-left Antifa extremist being shot dead after attempting to burn down an ICE facility in Tacoma, Washington. CNN covered the story over the weekend....until it became clear this was an Antifa attack on a government facility...a movement that CNN celebrated on United Shades of America.
In his Monday night newsletter, Stelter continued the R-word crusade against Trump, quoting from Edward R. Murrow's speechifying against Sen. Joseph McCarthy and echoing hacktastic Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan: "When confronted with racism and lying, we can't run and hide in the name of neutrality and impartiality. To do that is a dereliction of duty."
Stelter added "Amen..."
