You understand this, right? The media do not inform you. They don't even think that's their job. The media play a game. They take things people say and try to figure out how they can twist these statements into tales that support the narrative they're trying to push. It matters not in the slightest if the person meant what the media claims they meant. It only matters that they can convince you they did. And if the narrative is dishonest and the media know they're being dishonest, it's the fault of the misrepresented speaker for clumsily handing them good material to work with.
And by the way, they don't always do their own thinking about how to do this. Sometimes they're quite happy to take their cues from politicians they favor.
So: As Rob told you yesterday, Donald Trump was having some fun at Hillary's expense by joking that - since neither the FBI, the State Department nor the news media seemed to be able to find the 30,000 e-mails Hillary deleted from her server - maybe the Russians could find them, thus doing the media's job for them. The Russians, after all (by the Democrats' own insistence) had already hacked into the DNC's servers and given their e-mails to WikiLeaks. So why shouldn't we think they'd hacked into Hillary's server too?
Ha! Joke's on Hillary. Joke's on the media. And a good joke it was. If the Democrats are going to blame Russian hackers for the problems they've had this week, why not lampoon the whole idea?
But the news media are the most joyless, humorless bunch of slugs I've ever seen. Plus, they hate being lampooned. And they hate Donald Trump. So every time Trump opens his mouth, the media hope they can find a way to use it against him. But how can you do that when all he did was make a pretty darn funny joke at theirs and Hillary's expense?
No problem! Just take your cue from the Clinton campaign, which suggested that the media report what Trump said as if he was literally and seriously urging the Russians to hack sensitive information from the U.S. government. That's about as absurd and idiotic as a storyline can possibly be, and if the media jumped on it en masse, it would be obvious that they are basically acting as stenographers for the Clinton campaign. Would they be that shameless and that stupid?
Oh goodness yes. Here you go with dutiful reports from U.S. News and World Report, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Daily Beast and Salon - just to name a few. It caught on like a wildfire, providing lots of fodder for self-righteous lefties to hand-wring about on social media last night and this morning. Here's how the deep-in-the-tank-for-Hillary Washington Post "reported" it:
Donald Trump just walked into another political and foreign policy minefield of his own making.
Trump said Wednesday that he hopes a country that just happens to be one of the United States' most antagonistic fellow world powers — Russia — has or would obtain unreleased emails from Hillary Clinton's tenure as secretary of state.
"They probably have her 33,000 emails, too. I hope they do," he said, adding later: "Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press."
There are many, many potential problems with this scenario — and not just for Clinton's campaign, but also for U.S. national security. Indeed, the logical extension of his comments is that a foreign power would be deciding how to handle possibly sensitive information about a potential U.S. president.
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Now you know that the media operate with a pack mentality. A story catches fire and they all jump on it. It's much easier than thinking. And it just so happened that a reporter I'm sort of acquainted with, Chad Livengood of the Detroit News, had the opportunity to have a very short sit-down with Trump yesterday. Naturally, Livengood decided to waste some of his very limited time on this nonsense, and Trump called him out exactly as you might expect:
Now we always talk about how stupid, shallow and biased the news media are, but I think that if you merely resort back to those notions, you truly miss the point here: They are lying to you. They know Trump was kidding around. They also know that there would be no need for anyone to tell the Russians to hack Hillary's server because in all likelihood they did so long ago. They're trying to make you think Trump did something that Trump did not do.
And the reason this matters is that there really are a lot of people dumb enough to follow the media's lead on these things. You probably saw people going on about it on your social media feeds today. Oh my God! Trump encouraged the Russians to hack our systems! That's terrible!
Well, it's terrible reporting. And in order to explain how it's possible, you need to understand these four things about the media:
They're dishonest. They really don't care if the way they present something fairly represents what actually happened. They only care if they can get you to buy their narrative.
They're dumb. Yes, the crafters of this narrative are liars, but reporters are also sheep, and some of them really are idiotic enough to think that Trump did what the Times, the Post and the other liars claim he did.
They're intellectually lazy. To simply take what someone said literally with no understanding of context or intent is stunning for a bunch of people who claim to be brimming with curiosity, and claim that they dig and dig and dig for the truth. What Bolshevik. This is the ultimate in phoning it in.
They gladly take their cue from politicians, as long as they're politicians they want elected. Remember, as the Worst Web Site in the World reported, this started when the Hillary campaign suggested the narrative. The media just ran with it.
The news media are enemies of this country and enemies of the truth. That makes them enemies of you. Because they want you to think things that aren't true, so you will do things you would not do if you knew the truth. Every one of these slugs should be fired, and they would be if not for the fact that their bosses don't care about the truth any more than they do.
You understand this, right? The media do not inform you. They don't even think that's their job. The media play a game. They take things people say and try to figure out how they can twist these statements into tales that support the narrative they're trying to push. It matters not in the slightest if the person meant what the media claims they meant. It only matters that they can convince you they did. And if the narrative is dishonest and the media know they're being dishonest, it's the fault of the misrepresented speaker for clumsily handing them good material to work with.
And by the way, they don't always do their own thinking about how to do this. Sometimes they're quite happy to take their cues from politicians they favor.
