Posted on 04/05/2020 9:38:56 AM PDT by billorites
Millions of people worldwide are watching President Donald Trump’s frequent press conferences on the global pandemic. (Better ratings than the Bachelor! Maybe better ratings than Monday Night Football!)
There are two striking things about these press conferences. The first is what they reveal about the media, and the second is what they show about Mr. Trump.
On the first point, the interactions between the president and the press show that the craven, absurdly biased, anti-Trump, pro-China media corps still have not changed their approach, despite an ongoing global crisis and their repeated efforts to cause him to fail.
The media corps have doubled and tripled down on their attacks against the Trump administration. There is no spirit of unity that pervaded the post-9/11 atmosphere. No coming together of national interest in the face of a modern-day plague.
A new strain of biased reporting has emerged: “Live TV enables the President to lie to Americans about Covid-19,” says the Washington Post. Add to that a new mutation of lazy coverage: “Save time: Assume Trump is inept and lying.”
This is no surprise from the newspaper that publishes a rolling catalogue of so-called “lies” supposedly told by the president. “President Trump made 16,241 false or misleading claims in his first three years”! A fictional number, but more manageable than tabulating the false or misleading claims of the Washington Post or the general phenomenon of “opinion journalism pretending to some sort of heightened objectivity,” as James Taranto has repeatedly said.
On and on it goes. The New York Times: “Google gives cover to Trump’s lies.” The Atlantic: “Trump’s blatant coronavirus lies.” The Daily Beast: “Trump’s coronavirus lies are an infection. This is the only cure” (suggesting “doses of truth”).
Here’s another representative headline: “Broadcasting Trump’s Coronavirus Briefings Live Is a Danger to Public Health.” A new twist? Not even close. This one is as old as his time in office: “President Donald Trump Is a Threat to Public Health,” claimed the Harvard Public Health Review in 2017. “The first task of the doctor is political,” said the laughably un-medical argument. “The struggle against disease must begin with a war against bad government.” (Nothing about undercooked bat meat.)
And, while corporate media attack Mr. Trump and brand him a liar, they uncritically republish Chinese communist propaganda in a manner reminiscent of Pravda’s dissemination of USSR disinformation.
Lacking professional skepticism, and despite early evidence that the Chinese government covered up the catastrophe as it unfolded in Wuhan unimpeded while brave Chinese health experts risked their lives to spread the truth, the China-credulous media continue to parrot the Chinese government’s official reports. Some of the US media’s coverage even praised the Chinese government for “helping Italy” in its fight against the virus.
With all of these forces arrayed against the president, a fair-minded observer might wonder if this is a fair fight. It’s not.
And that leads me to my second observation about the press conferences. Mr. Trump is winning.
The colloquies between Mr. Trump and media showcase his mastery of the press conference format and, let’s face it, complete dominance over his adversaries known as White House media correspondents. The press conferences succeed so well that Mr. Trump’s adversaries in the media even want to stop live broadcasting and straight-news reporting during a pandemic.
Once again Mr. Trump is disrupting the media narrative. Even with his campaign rallies cancelled and most Americans unable to engage in their regular daily lives, the president’s disruptive ability as a communicator harken back to his 2016 presidential campaign, when virtually all forces of the mainstream media were unable to stop the steam-locomotive power of the Trump Train.
The press briefings are yet another medium in which Mr. Trump can speak directly and unfiltered to voters. Viewers who tune in and watch the briefings live can see firsthand Mr. Trump’s mastery of the process. Media mendacity cannot stop him. Even with journalists’ misleading snippets and their spliced-together fragments designed to deceive or isolate words from context, the president continues to win.
When a reporter tried to ambush Mr. Trump with a selectively misleading quote from an earlier press conference, the president forced the reporter to admit on live television that he had omitted the sentences in which Mr. Trump praised his team and the Army Corps of Engineers.
As a Bloomberg reporter readied an attempt at a gotcha question, Mr. Trump asked, “How’s Michael doing? Good?” as the audience chuckled.
In a defining moment, and my own personal favorite, another reporter asked, “How many deaths are acceptable?” to which the president immediately responded, “How many deaths are acceptable to me? None. Okay? None, if that’s your question.”
To this gotcha question designed to elicit a gaffe, the president delivered a knockout punch. No deaths are acceptable. Pure and simple. The media continue to try to trip up the president during these press briefings. Having repeatedly failed, they now want to shut down live coverage.
The pandemic has not changed the mainstream media’s war against Mr. Trump. As much as they try to leverage our current crisis to debilitate the president, their efforts continue to backfire.
Hence why they want to censor the POTUS.
Much harder to lie about what President Trump said when people heard him with their own ears.
They show that the media is not willing to set aside their biases for the good of our country,
America media = vile scum
Trump is so far superior in brain power and common sense to that of the news media, that it is no contest.
At this rate, the press should be begging that Trump go back to rallies instead of the daily airtime he’s getting.
The pandemic has not changed the mainstream media’s war against Mr. Trump. As much as they try to leverage our current crisis to debilitate the president, their efforts continue to backfire.
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ROFLOLOL...it does remind me of when he was on the campaign trail...he says what he thinks and he means what he says...a New Yorker for sure...
The loony libs hate him, they can’t control him; impeachment is backfiring on them, if it wasn’t for Nazi Nanzi and Adam Sh-ithead, we would have known sooner about China and their ‘virus’...loony libs fault there...
He has formed a task force for this ‘virus’ with V.P. Pence and have two well informed Doctors even if they are The Smelly Old Hags friends, it’s their knowledge he wants not who has a gin tonic with her...
Oh I love Our President...March on my man, there are MILLIONS joining your train and it’s picking up a lot of power!!!
Partisan Media Shills update.
Wisconsin is one of the few states going forward with their primary election this coming Tuesday, April 7th, 2020. Every Democrat voting should write in Donald J. Trump for POTUS!!!
A vote cast for Democrats, Biden, Sanders, Cuomo is a wasted vote. None of these losers would ever come close to beating Trump!!! Folks...the Democrat Party is destroying itself....wake up!!!
But who is watching?
It’s Trump just preaching to the choir.
Trump is pulling the country together and the media is pulling it apart.
Bump
The right President for the time.
God protect him and his family.
That is great point.
The more people see him the better they like him plus they see how much he and the team are doing.
“How many deaths are acceptable to me? None. Okay? None, if that’s your question.”
My favorite response was when Trump was asked if a famous basketball player deserved greater medical attention than the common man got. Trump said “that’s life”.
Not from what I'm reading. My old Dem friends are watching or maybe reading about them and they ARE frustrated and flustered. They want him stopped. RINO friends talk about “lack of leadership.” They praise Cuomo (though a bit less after his “stockpile” comments!
“But who is watching?
It’s Trump just preaching to the choir.”
I suspect lots of Independents are tuning in.
I’ve said here before what kind of man Donald Trump is. He’s a real New Yorker. He lives by a simple rule:”You wanna play f**k around, we’ll play f**k around. And you’ll lose’’.
Blinding hatred makes one dazzlingly stupid.
I watch every Trump coronavirus press conference, twice a day. I listen to it live while working, and then watch again at night with my husband and sometimes my kids.
They are informative, interesting, often funny, and entertaining. (Sometimes too repetitive. I never want to hear the word “ventilator” again.) I also love watching how Trump (and others) show mastery: how to run a meeting, how to interpret data, how to show confidence, how to influence the public and get them to feel like quarantine is voluntary and patriotic, how to win a war, how to fend off stupid questions, how to succeed. How and when to praise and to criticize. Trump praises OFTEN. I should praise my own staff more often, I’ve realized.
And how to recover from mistakes. (Jared’s comment about “our stockpile” was a mistake—note it wasn’t Trump’s mistake, although Trump wasn’t good at explaining “federal stockpile” also means “might need to be reserved for military use too” which would have been helpful to say.)
Trump is my leadership mentor.
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