Donald Trump is no stranger to the progressive press. Left-leaning news outlets seemed to target him the moment he announced his intention to run for president, and they haven’t let up since. The bias has been plain to see for anyone with two eyes and half a brain. But the president has hardly pulled his punches, either.
The latest salvo in Trump’s war on “fake news” is a tracker of sorts on the White House website called the Media Bias Hall of Shame. As Liberty Nation News’ Michele White reported, the new page, launched Friday, Nov. 28, reads like a legal case to expose and refute the bias of these outlets, story by story. In reading the Hall of Shame site, one can’t help but recall the last time the White House officially went hands-on with the press: Joe Biden’s short-lived Disinformation Governance Board (DGB). Of course, publicly roasting media outlets for their bias and secretly trying to control their content are two very different things. Still, it puts Americans in an uncomfortable position. Do we trust a blatantly biased press – or the government?
TDS On Display: The Biased Press Exposed
Listed as Media Offender of the Week, the claim that President Trump called for the execution of the six members of Congress in the now-infamous military disobedience video presently has top billing in the Hall of Shame. What’s the offense? The media misrepresented President Trump’s call to hold the six accountable for demanding disobedience from the military and implying that Trump’s orders are illegal, according to the White House. To clarify, Trump did call the video seditious, and he did say they should be held accountable. Making the jump from “hold them accountable” to “execute the traitors” requires a bit of mental gymnastics, however. Yes, the actual crime of treason can be punished with the death penalty – but calling political adversaries treasonous or seditious and actually prosecuting them for treason are two very different things.
In a page posted Sunday, Nov. 30, titled Lie Archive, the Trump administration lays out several more examples of what it considers fake news. Atop this page was a story by Lily Dallow for KTLA. Under “The Offense,” the White House says Dallow “blindly accepted” the claims of a Los Angeles woman who said she had been kidnapped by ICE but who was, in fact, never in ICE custody. Was it fake news to report the woman’s claim? Certainly not – if she made a claim and it was reported, then that’s news. But what if an outlet fails to present that narrative as an unverified claim by an individual that has been disputed by the government and instead makes the claim alongside her?
Other examples include CNN making it look as if the U.S. hadn’t “totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program. Under the heading “Key Points,” the site claims: “[F]ake news journalist Natasha Bertrand published a confidential and inaccurate assessment of Operation Midnight Hammer.” The assessment, later declared inaccurate, was an actual leaked government document, however.
Whether this qualifies as actual fake news, then, depends on one’s definition of the term. If any news story that is clearly biased for or against someone but otherwise gets the facts right is fake news, then this certainly fits the bill. If mere bias isn’t enough, but a failure to report all the facts – that this report wasn’t the currently accepted assessment, for instance – then it likely still qualifies. But if a story has to be an outright fabrication, then applying that label here might be a bit of a stretch.
Are these outlets in the wrong for telling only part of the story or even telling the whole story in as negative a manner as possible to satisfy their Trump Derangement Syndrome? It sure seems so – but one should be careful of lumping clearly biased coverage that qualifies more as opinion pieces than news stories in with outright lies and fabrications presented as fact.
Big Brother, Arbiter Of Truth?
That the establishment press would launch what amounts to a propaganda campaign against a president, in which truth holds no value compared to pushing the narrative, is a frightening idea. But the idea that Big Brother should be the arbiter of truth is just as terrifying – if not more. The press can drive public opinion, but the government dictates policy and law.
Donald Trump and Joe Biden, in many ways, couldn’t be more different from each other – and the actions of their respective administrations certainly show that. Even still, it was a president who launched what a federal judge called “the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.”
Under the direction of Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security, the Disinformation Governance Board was established to ostensibly fight the threat of mis-and disinformation. Biden’s Ministry of Truth, as many critics called it, reached out to social media companies to flag certain statements and opinions regarding elections, COVID, and the Hunter Biden laptop story, amongst others. Less than a month later, it was “paused.”
Naturally, the left-wing press that had dedicated so much ink to destroying Trump and boosting Biden was outraged that a government entity designed to enforce an accepted narrative across the various forms of media had been stopped. What a terrifying idea: The American press begging for censorship. It’s hard to say which situation is scarier: a dishonest press in cahoots with and running cover for a government that toes the same ideological line or that same press using manipulative coverage – if not outright lies – to attack an opposing government for all the wrong reasons. And what happens if that government decides to fight back?
James Fite is Editor-at-Large of Liberty Nation.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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