On Friday, the American Political Science Association had a panel discussion on President Trump and the media, which later aired on C-SPAN. Former deputy press secretary Raj Shah expressed alarm at NewsBusters studies by Rich Noyes (and other studies) showing 90-percent negative coverage of the president. Former Clinton press secretary Mike McCurry wise-cracked that's because 90 percent of Trump's actions are crazy.
RAJ SHAH: It is tough, if you are the leader of the free world, and there's studies that come out that show 90-plus percent of primetime news coverage is negative. I mean, like, that's that's like alarming. You know what I mean? That level --
MIKE McCURRY: That's because 90 percent of the stuff he is doing is crazy. [Laughter]
SHAH: No, it's not. No, it's not. That's absurd. No, that's absurd.No, no, look, the news media has a ton of bias. It just does. and --
McCURRY: If there was a liberal bias in the press, I sure as hell wished it would've shown up that more frequently when I was at the podium. I didn't feel very comforted. I felt more afflicted.
SHAH: Well, I don't think partisan bias is the only form of bias. There is bias toward conventional wisdom, bias toward conflict, bias towards a lot of things but I do think there is pretty like unsparing partisan bias in news coverage. I think to kind of ignore that, or to pretend it is like not the driving force behind this conflict, is, I think kind of missing the point.
Minutes later, NPR White House reporter Tamara Keith called Trump's "enemy of the people" rhetoric about the media as "dangerous and dehumanizing," as usual without noting what the media and their sources call the president, which is never considered as endangering to the president.
KEITH: I worry about being the opposition party. I don't want to be the opposition party. I don't see myself as that. I see myself as a journalist doing journalism, shining light, asking questions, exposing truth. And I don't like being put in a position of being somehow oppositional...We're all out just trying to share the news with the people in a way that's fair and reflective of reality.
We at NewsBusters remember Keith certainly wasn't oppositional when she was covering Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign in 2016. When Hillary's nomination was mathematically assured, Keith spoke for the Liberal Women in asking this puffball:
“Secretary, last night when you took stage in Sacramento, there was a woman standing next to me who was absolutely sobbing. And she said, you know, ‘It's time. It's past time.’”
She continued, “People here and people just come up to you and they get tears in their eyes.... Do you feel the weight of what this means for people?”
