The media has officially lost its damn mind
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KYLE SMITH
Remember the dunking-kid meme from a couple of years ago? Little kid runs up to his tiny basketball hoop, dunks the ball, turns around to flex and holler. Meanwhile he doesn’t see that the whole backboard is wobbling and about to collapse on his head. When it does, he looks confused.
Congrats, New York Times! And Politico. And CNN. You’re all the Dunking Kids. You keep throwing down on the Trump administration. The backboard of truth keeps falling on your head. The rest of us laugh.
The New York Times just issued its most spectacular correction since my personal favorite, from Nov. 7, 2012: “An earlier version of this article misspelled the singer’s surname in a number of places. He is Bruce Springsteen, not Springstein.”
This Sunday’s correction cut the legs out from under its big Saturday scoop about a supposed new sex scandal about Brett Kavanaugh involving a woman who supposedly had Kavanaugh’s penis shoved into her hand when they were both at Yale. The Times’ gobsmacking correction noted that in the book from which its Saturday report was derived, “the female student declined to be interviewed and friends say that she does not recall the incident. That information has been added to the article.”
Backboard of truth meets skull.
This capped off a week in which the Times had to delete a tweet praising Mao Zedong, one of history’s greatest mass murderers, as “one of history’s great revolutionary figures” and another tweet saying that what happened on 9/11 was that “airplanes took aim and brought down the World Trade Center.” Times editors doubtless thought that mentioning radical Islamists were the ones who aimed those airplanes would play into Trump’s hands.
Meanwhile, Politico was sticking with a bonkers attempt to make a scandal out of Air Force members paying a cheap $130 a night to stay at a Trump resort in Scotland called Turnberry while they were refueling their planes at a nearby airport Trump does not own or profit from.
Politico solemnly reported that “up to 6 percent” of Air Force members had stayed at the Trump property while refueling at the airport. So the resort is affordable, service members have been staying there since the Obama years and at least 94 percent of those staying in the area stay at some other hotel. Politico tried to frame this as a violation of the Emoluments Clause that forbids presidents from cashing in on their position while in office. That doesn’t pass the laugh test.
Meanwhile, MSNBC gave airtime to Jason Johnson, a journalism professor from Morgan State, who made the following vicious, defamatory and utterly bonkers statement about Justice Kavanaugh: “I’ve never heard of a guy who is a one-time rapist. I’ve never heard of a one-time sexual assaulter. I grew up with guys like this. He’s from around this area, right? He is the fifth guy in a gang rape. He’s the guy who comes in after he is drunk because everybody else encourages him and he can get away with it. He’s been pretty much covered his entire life. And now he’s on the Supreme Court.”
Just a few days earlier, CNN issued a report on the circumstances around an American spy being taken out of Russia that was so wrong, the Times felt moved to contradict it: The decision to extract the spy was made while Obama was president, the Times reported, yet CNN blamed Trump for endangering the agent and forcing his extraction.
This isn’t just a story of media bias. It’s a story of utter unbe-frickin’-lievable obliviousness by the media. CNN doesn’t bother putting a fig leaf on anything anymore: A glance at CNN’s homepage on any given day is like looking at an assortment of Democratic Party press releases.
Any news that might be happening that can’t be weaponized against Trump is of little interest. Any news that might make Trump or anyone on the right look bad is eagerly pushed through, ordinary standards of fairness and checking be damned.
The media think Trump’s sometimes overblown attacks on them are making it more vital than ever. But what’s really happening is that the media is beclowning itself trying to end Trump. One recent survey found 95 percent of Americans saying they were troubled by the current state of the media, and two-thirds think journalistic ethics will get worse during the election season. Ow, media. Backboard, head.
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