A new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll finds that slightly more than half of Americans think that the media’s coverage of President Trump has been too critical.
The poll found that 51% of Americans think the media is too critical of the President, though 41% feel the coverage has been fair and objective, with 6% saying the media haven’t been tough enough.
A slightly larger majority—53%—believes that the news media have exaggerated problems in the Trump administration, while 45% don’t believe that to be the case.
The biggest surprise came from the 40% of poll respondents who cited MSNBC as their primary news source. They said that they agreed that “the news media and other elites are exaggerating the problems of the Trump administration, because they are uncomfortable and threatened by the kind of change that Trump represents.”
Since taking office, Trump has waged a very public battle with the liberal media and their penchant for “fake news,” in an effort to discredit his administration. Even though only a slight majority believe that the media have been too harsh on him, it’s enough for him to continue his attacks on the media—much to their consternation.
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President Trump escalated his battle with the liberal media on Friday when he tweeted that they were “the enemy of the American people,” but he wasn’t the first person to place that label on them.
At Accuracy in Media’s “ObamaNation—A Day of Truth” conference in September 2012, Democratic pollster Patrick Caddell ripped into the media for their bias:
“The press’s job is to stand in the ramparts and protect the liberty and freedom of all of us from a government and from organized governmental power. When they desert those ramparts and they go to serve—to decide that they will now become active participants—when they decide that their job is not simply to tell you who you may vote for, and who you may not, but, worse—and this is the danger of the last two weeks—what truth that you may know, as an American, and what truth you are not allowed to know, they have, then, made themselves a fundamental threat to the democracy, and, in my opinion, made themselves the enemy of the American people. And it is a threat to the very future of this country if…we allow this stuff to go on, and…we’ve crossed a whole new and frightening slide on the slippery slope this last two weeks, and it needs to be talked about.”
NBC News president Deborah Turness has been named the president of NBC News International, which is the network’s side of a new partnership with EuroNews, a pan-European satellite news service based in Lyon, France. Turness oversaw the firing of Meet the Press host David Gregory and the removal of Brian Williams as the Nightly News anchor after he was caught lying about being on a helicopter that was shot and forced down in Iraq.
Turness had been at NBC News since 2013, but her role was diminished after the Williams debacle. In 2015, the network brought back Andrew Lack to oversee both NBC News and MSNBC.
Turness will be replaced by Noel Oppenheim, the executive producer of the Today show.
Lack spun the move as a positive one for Turness in a memo to the staff. But the change occurred not long after the network was criticized for how it handled the departure of black anchor Tamron Hall, who was squeezed out after NBC signed former Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly to a big contract. Lack signaled that he had tired of Turness’ management decisions:
“Deborah has been integral to this process—she’s been my partner for several months in assessing the opportunity and aligning our vision with Euronews.
Deborah joined NBC News three and a half years ago. In no small measure due to her leadership, all four of our broadcasts finished 2016 as number one in both of the key demos—for the first time since 2011.
She’s driven the news division on big scoops and exclusives and considerably upped our game on covering international news. Her commitment to ‘journalism with a capital J’ can be seen in the many prestigious awards NBC News has won in the last few years. She also led a massive overhaul of our systems and processes, just one of the many ways she has made us all better and brighter.”
With these changes, Lack now has a lieutenant of his own choosing—one who hopefully won’t cause NBC any further embarrassment.
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Former CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather has launched a new Facebook page to ferret out real news from what he considers to be the fake news that has proliferated since the election:
Please join me on an exciting new endeavor.
I love news. I always have and can confidently say I always will. Journalism, real journalism, deep-digging reporting without fear or favor, is as important now, if not more so, than any time I can remember.
Together, on this Facebook page, we have built a community that I know values real news. But there is only so much I can share and on which I can comment. Take a week like this week, where the news of the confirmation hearings is coming fast and furious. There are far more articles that deserve your attention and great reporters who I would love to spotlight.
I got into news in the first place to be part of something noble and bigger than myself. For those reasons, I am starting a second Facebook page called News And Guts, a digital news feed of sorts. It’s also the name of my digital news and production company. The goal is to inform, innovate, and inspire. This Facebook page will be under the stewardship of a very talented group of reporters who work at my company. These are men and women who know real news. They’ve reported with me around the globe from dangerous and difficult datelines. I trust them and so should you.
You may find the tone of the page a little more free-wheeling than mine but we also want this to be a two-way street. Share with us your thoughts or articles or stories you want us to cover.
In an era of fake news, false equivalence, and too much fluff, let’s take a stand together to demand better, and bring attention to all those doing great work. Please click here: News And Guts, give the page itself a like, and let’s jump into a new experiment.”
Rather makes it sound as if the new page will be fighting fake news and presenting only what his team considers to be real news. But in reality it is nothing but a page devoted to negative news about President Trump and his administration.
I scrolled through the entire page and there wasn’t a single positive story on anything the President and his administration have done—not one—just dozens of stories from the women’s march to every single controversy that the liberals have cooked up about the Trump administration.
In the “About” section of the page it says the following:
“Dan Rather has created a media company that promotes his vision of real journalism, news of integrity and as he would say a ‘play no favorites, pull no punches’ brand of reporting. News with guts. In these turbulent times, we seek nothing more than the truth.”
That’s pretty rich coming from a man who was responsible for a story about President George W. Bush’s Air National Guard service in 2004 that was proven false and led to Rather’s resignation from CBS, as well as a black eye for the network.
Maybe Rather would be a good arbiter of fake news, since he is a Godfather of it after all.
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President-elect Donald Trump, who rode his tweets all the way to the White House, told Fox News’ Ainsley Earhardt that he really doesn’t like to tweet, but does it to combat what he sees as a dishonest media.
“Look, I don’t like tweeting, I have other things I can be doing. But I get very dishonest media, very dishonest press. And it’s my only way that I can counteract. When people make misstatements about me, I’m able to say it and call it out.”
Trump added that if the press started treating him fairly, he would stop using Twitter.
“Now if the press were honest, which it’s not, I would absolutely not use Twitter.”
Trump also commented on his spat with civil rights icon Rep. John Lewis (D-GA), who told NBC’s Chuck Todd that he didn’t see the President-elect as “legitimate,” and that he would be skipping the inauguration for the first time since he’s been in Congress.
“When John Lewis said he’s never done it before where he’s skipped an inauguration — well, he has. It turned out to be a lie, so I’m able to say that. He shouldn’t have said a thing like that. It was terrible. I’m able to say it,” Trump told Earhardt.
Trump was referring to the fact that Lewis skipped George W. Bush’s first inauguration because he didn’t think Bush was the “true elected president,” as reported by The Washington Post on January 21, 2001.
With 20 million followers on Twitter, Trump has an audience that the media can only dream about to get his message out. And he understands that it can be a very effective tool to combat the liberal media’s reporting on him, which scares them to death. Instead try Twesocial.
I doubt that Trump will quit Twitter during his presidency—not just because the media will never treat him fairly, but because Twitter, like a lot of social media platforms, is very addicting. Why would he want to quit something when it provides him with the attention of 20 million people?
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In his first press conference since winning the election, President-elect Donald Trump scorched the liberal media as he answered a wide variety of questions.
During the press conference, Trump called Buzzfeed—which published unverified information that Russia had compromising information on Trump—“a failing pile of garbage,” and got into a shouting match with CNN’s Jim Acosta.
Trump called the network “fake news,” showing that he wasn’t about to let the liberal media control his message, and signaling a new era in presidential press relations that will certainly give the media fits for years to come.
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Greta Van Susteren, who abruptly left Fox News last September after 14 years at the network, appeared on the Rachel Maddow Show on Thursday, appealing to her Fox fans to follow her over to her new MSNBC show, which starts airing on Monday evening.
“I think that the MSNBC audience is going to like me. I hope the Fox audience comes over here,” Van Susteren told Maddow. “I want to do a good job for MSNBC. I want to do a good job so you’re proud of me, my colleagues are proud of me and most of all I want to do a good job for the viewers.”
That’s all well and good, but will the same type of guests that appeared on Van Susteren’s Fox show appear on her MSNBC show?
“Do you think those Republican connections that you made, the Republican guests you’ve been able to book, up to and including the President-elect, do you think they will still want to talk to you over here?” Maddow asked.
“I certainly hope so. I think they’re going to come over here. I’m going to give them a fair shake, I’ll give Republicans a fair shake, I’ll give Democrats a fair shake.” she replied.
Van Susteren, who spent 10 years at CNN before bolting to Fox News, is certainly the type of “name” that NBC News chairman Andrew Lack has been seeking to bolster the MSNBC lineup. Her more right-leaning viewers will likely be a stumbling block in building an audience at a network where the liberal viewpoint dominates.
Just like with her former colleague Megyn Kelly, who announced this week that she was leaving Fox News for NBC, any expectation that a significant number of Fox News viewers will abandon the conservative network to follow either Kelly or Van Susteren to their new homes should be immediately dismissed, as television viewers are creatures of habit and are far more likely to stay put and watch their replacements.
In the case of Van Susteren, her replacement, Tucker Carlson, has vastly improved on her ratings—so much so that he will now replace Megyn Kelly in the coveted 9 p.m. prime time slot—while Martha MacCallum takes over at 7 p.m., as Fox continues to draw from a very deep bench.
Carlson may not achieve Kelly-like ratings, but he will be a solid performer with a lead-in from Bill O”Reilly, and will be followed by Sean Hannity.
Van Susteren’s return to television is more like a comedown than a comeback, considering that she will now be working for the No. 3 cable news network, which will probably only fall further behind Fox News now that the election is over.
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If you thought Hillary Clinton’s year couldn’t get any worse, it just did, with the former Democratic presidential nominee being named to GQ’s “Least Influential People Of 2016” list.
GQ’s Drew Magary wasn’t happy about placing her on the list, but he felt he had no choice after she lost the election to Donald Trump:
“I hate putting her here, given that liberals turned on her like pit vipers the moment she conceded, and given that nearly three million more people voted for her than her opponent, and given that Russia deliberately hijacked the election cycle. But I have no choice. When you lose an election to Donald Trump, you belong on this list. How do you f*** that up?? It’s Donald Trump! I genuinely doubt whether that man can tie his own shoes, and he still beat her. Would it have killed you to visit Wisconsin, Hillary? I know it’s full of fat people and bad pretzels, but sometimes you gotta come out of your fundraising hole and kiss some babies. I’ll never get over it. I’ll be 80 and on my deathbed and my kids will be around me and I’ll beckon them closer and, in my final moments, I will whisper these words like a secret: ‘I can’t believe she lost to that asshole.’”
I think Magary may still be just a tad bitter at the election results.
Others that made the list include Hillary’s running mate Tim Kaine, Anthony Weiner, Matt Lauer and Gary Johnson.
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The newsroom’s blinding whiteness hit me when I walked in the door six months ago. It’s hardly a new problem here, but it’s one that persists even as the country grows more diverse and The Times grows more global. The head of that global expansion, Lydia Polgreen, was one of The Times’s highest-ranking African-American editors until she left last week to lead The Huffington Post. Her departure hit the whole newsroom hard, but it was especially a blow to many minority journalists here.
In the past three months, I have interviewed people across the newsroom about the issue of race (and to some degree gender, which I’ll address in a future column). I’ve spoken with journalists of all racial and ethnic identities, in jobs high and low: white men and black women, editors and reporters, department heads and news assistants. It left me believing there is a level of frustration bordering on anger that would be institutionally reckless not to address.”
Spayd noted that only two of the 20-plus reporters who covered the presidential campaign for the Times were black, and there were no Latinos or Asians in the pool, making it less diverse than President-elect Donald Trump’s cabinet. She added that all six members of the new White House reporting team are white, as are most of the reporters in the Washington bureau.
The disparity exists throughout the paper, from the Metro section to the sports department, according to Spayd.
Spayd also noted that even though executive editor Dean Baquet is black, all the other editors on the masthead are white.
The Times isn’t alone in the diversity battle. Spayd cited figures from the American Society of News Editors showing that the Times is less diverse than large papers like The Washington Post (31 percent), The Los Angeles Times (34 percent) and The Miami Herald (41 percent), but ahead of The Boston Globe (17 percent) and The Philadelphia Inquirer (14 percent). She feels that the Times should be a leader, not a laggard, on the issue.
Even though I personally find the diversity movement a bunch of nonsense concocted by liberals to make it appear that they actually care about racial equality, it’s amusing to see the nation’s leading liberal newspaper falling short of the mark while criticizing others—especially conservatives and Republicans—for the lack of diversity in their ranks.
The Times should take a long look in the mirror before deciding to comment about the lack of diversity in other places.
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With Donald Trump just 39 days away from being inaugurated as the 45th president of the United States, newspapers are hanging out the “help wanted” sign as they struggle to find pro-Trump columnists to write for their editorial pages.
According to TheWashington Post’s Paul Farhi, traditionally Republican-supporting newspapers like the Des Moines Register and the Arizona Republic are having as much trouble as their more liberal counterparts, The Washington Post and New York Times, in locating writers willing to pen pro-Trump columns for their respective op-ed pages.
Farhi says the papers have conservative writers, but few if any of them are Trump supporters:
“’We struggled to find voices that could advocate for Donald Trump’s ideas,’ said James Bennet, the Times’ editorial-page editor. ‘It was really unusual. It didn’t help that the conservative intelligentsia lined up against him.’ But Bennet says Trump’s campaign contributed to the imbalance: ‘He didn’t have the people around him who were prepared to put together his arguments’ for publication.
Lynn Hicks, the Des Moines Register’s opinion editor, found a parallel at his newspaper, the largest in the swing state that wound up going for Trump. ‘Given that almost all of our Republican leadership in Iowa supported Trump, I kept waiting for [supportive op-ed] pieces to arrive,’ Hicks said. ‘I’m still waiting.’”
USA Today has bucked the trend, carrying columns by Instapundit founder Glenn Reynolds, Trump running-mate Mike Pence and campaign surrogate Rudy Giuliani. But they are the exception rather than the rule.
This has left the papers in a bind, according to Farhi, since they try to present a rough balance between right and left opinions on their op-ed pages. Balance? Really?
They say karma is a—well you know what—and that seems to be biting the newspapers in their collective asses as their all-out effort to defeat Trump backfired miserably, leaving them with a stable of writers who are out of touch with the new reality that Trump will be the president, and that the old rules no longer apply.
That doesn’t mean that they won’t still try to find pro-Trump columnists, according to Farhi:
“The Washington Post’s editorial-page editor, Fred Hiatt, said the paper is as committed ‘as ever’ to offering readers ‘a range of smart, independent thinking, and we are always thinking about whether there are new voices we should be adding’ as Trump takes office.
Said the Times’ Bennet: ‘We owe it to our readers to help them hear the voices that were supportive of Trump. .?.?. I’m proud of the work we did, but we could have done better.’”
Far better, as it turns out.
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CNN’s Jake Tapper criticized Slate for publishing a misleading story about Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, saying that her remarks at a Politico event had been taken out of context, according to his sources.
Slate published an article Wednesday with the headline, “Kellyanne Conway Suggests That Women With Kids Shouldn’t Take Jobs in the White House.”
But according to Tapper, his sources said that Slate twisted the truth.
The Politico story referred to a backstage conversation that Senior White House Advisor Valerie Jarrett had with Conway at the “Women Rule” event:
“During her earlier conversation, Conway said she intends to remain connected to Trump once he takes office but implied that it would be nearly impossible for her to take on an official White House role and be a mother to her four children, all of which are younger than 12, at the same time.
‘I do politely mention to them the question isn’t would you take the job, the male sitting across from me who’s going to take a big job in the White House. The question is would you want your wife to,’ Conway said, describing conversations she’s had with male colleagues. ‘Would you want the mother of your children to? You really see their entire visage change. It’s like, oh, no, they wouldn’t want their wife to take that job.’”
Conway wasn’t saying that women with children should never work in the White House, but that the men she spoke to said they wouldn’t want their wives to, and that it would be hard for her to do so given the ages of her children. That is completely different than what Slate’s headline implied. And she certainly isn’t against working mothers, having just run a grueling presidential campaign for three months.
For Slate it’s just another day in their truth-twisting world.
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Former Fox News anchor Greta Van Susteren takes journalists to task for the proliferation of fake news, in an op-ed in The Los Angeles Times on Monday.
Van Susteren said that while fake news is a problem, it’s not a new phenomenon considering that Americans have been lapping up fringe stories for decades, from the Kennedy assassination grassy knoll conspiracy theories to the “baseless notion that 9/11 was an inside job.” She then went on describe what was new:
“What is new is a propensity for large segments of society to believe things that are clearly untrue. Pope Francis wouldn’t and didn’t endorse Donald Trump. An FBI agent involved with Hillary Clinton’s email investigation wasn’t found dead in a murder-suicide. These memes were launched by specious Internet sites as satire or were put out as purposeful misinformation. Their spread could have been halted by a more skeptical public.”
Yet one of the reasons that the public gets so easily sucked up into the fake news cycle is that they distrust the media to tell them the truth.
Van Susteren then concludes with some advice to journalists on what they can do to slow the spread of fake news:
“Real reporting is detective work, trying to get to the bottom of a story or event. That requires skepticism and patience. If a reporter is going to be an advocate, he or she should play devil’s advocate — and do it with every source, on all sides.
Part of the reason fake news is so easy to believe is that fringe stories no longer read or sound all that different from too many of the real stories. Too often, both have little or no sourcing; they lack context and they get disseminated with almost no fact-checking. Sometimes the fake stories look, sound or read better than real ones. And both are chasing the same thing: ratings or online clicks.
There’s a reason our Founding Fathers explicitly guaranteed freedom of the press in the 1st Amendment. It is imperative for a free and healthy society. Just ask the journalists in unfree places who every day risk their lives on its behalf. If we are squandering that freedom, don’t just blame Facebook or Twitter. Blame all of us.”
The 24/7 news cycle has created more pressure on reporters and newsrooms to generate stories at a rapid pace. As Van Susteren noted, that has led to a lack of sourcing and fact-checking, and opened the door to fake news.
If the media are truly interested in halting or slowing the spread of fake news, they need to start cleaning up their own houses instead of blaming others for this scourge.
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CNN Worldwide president Jeff Zucker is the latest media executive to chime in on how his company will cover the Trump administration, telling attendees at a dinner on Tuesday for the Committee to Protect Journalists that they plan on holding the new administration’s “feet to the fire,” according to CNN’s Brian Stelter:
“We will hold the new administration’s feet to the fire. And they should respect that, even if they don’t welcome it.”
Zucker added that “it is still too early to draw conclusions about how this administration will work with the media,” but, “I think it is fair to say that based on some of what we saw during the campaign, we have some reason for concern.”
It may not matter what Zucker and his colleagues in the liberal media think or how they plan to cover the Trump administration. What is clear is that the President-elect is rewriting the rules as they relate to the media. On Monday, Trump released a YouTube video on how the transition is going and what he plans to do in his first 100 days in office. That video, which bypassed the media, has now been viewed nearly 6.3 million times and has the media in a tizzy because they think that they should be the filter for all the news coming from Trump.
That video, along with the meetings that Trump has held with the media this week in New York, represent a new order as to how the media will cover Trump once he takes office. That new order may mean fewer press conferences and more direct-to-the-public videos, along with Trump’s ubiquitous tweets to spread the administration’s message—leaving the media to find another line of attack.
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For the second week in a row, the publisher of a major newspaper has issued a letter to its readers promising that they will cover the Donald Trump presidency accurately and fairly. Last week it was The New York Times, this week it’s the Los Angeles Times:
We have just completed a historic presidential election, with major implications for the nation and our state. But for all of us — citizens and journalists alike — the next chapter of our history is now unfolding.
Throughout the campaign, the Los Angeles Times remained committed to fair and accurate coverage, while keeping our sights on the issues most important to our readers.
It is heartening that so many people, a record 9 million visits, turned to us on election day. We added 2,000 new digital subscribers that week. And thousands more signed up for a trial subscription on latimes.com.
Now that the election is history, we are redoubling our efforts to report on the Trump administration and California’s unique role in our nation. We are committed to covering the administration with rigor, accuracy and fairness.
We have been able to do this critical work with the support from our readers. Please consider subscribing now by clicking here.
Sincerely,
Davan Maharaj
Editor-in-Chief and Publisher
These moves by two of the largest newspapers in the country are unprecedented and reflect the fact that the liberal media are feeling chastened after their overt effort to defeat Trump, which failed miserably and destroyed what remaining credibility they had.
While it’s encouraging to see these two liberal lions of the newspaper business profess a newfound commitment to honesty and accuracy in covering the new president, it’s really nothing more than window dressing in an attempt to regain their readers’ trust.
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Donna Brazile, the interim chair of the Democratic National Committee and one time CNN contributor, took a shot at the cable news network for “ripping me a new one,” instead of allowing her to defend herself after WikiLeaks emails surfaced that showed that she leaked town hall and debate questions to the Clinton campaign.
Brazile’s criticism came during a speech at Hollins University, according to the Roanoke Times:
“CNN never gave me a question. I wish CNN had given me some other things, like the ability to defend myself rather than ripping me a new one.”
Brazile didn’t deny the allegations, but said she “never got on Clinton’s campaign airplane or prepped the candidate for any of the debates,” according to the Roanoke Times.
CNN denied that it had supplied any questions in advance to Brazile, but CNN Worldwide president Jeff Zucker said that he had “no tolerance for her behavior or that kind of behavior,” and that it “hurts all of us.”
Brazile also commented on the disappointing election results:
“It’s not as therapeutic as actual grief. Actual grief, there’s a stage in which you can move on, but in political grief, it’s circling because everybody feels as though their indignation, their righteous indignation, can be aimed at and turned to someone else.”
That indignation—certainly not righteous—is being exhibited by protests and riots against the election of Trump, calls to abolish the electoral college and sniping by the liberal media, which tried in vain to defeat Trump.
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President-elect Donald Trump’s stunning victory has sent the liberal media reeling, as they saw their concerted effort to defeat the billionaire businessman go down in flames.
Heading into Tuesday, even as polls tightened, Hillary Clinton and the Democrats were still very confident that voters would buy into their message that Trump was a misogynist, bully, racist or worse, and extend the Obama presidency by casting their ballot for the first woman president in U.S. history.
In the early part of the evening things unfolded more or less as expected. Both Trump and Clinton won states that they were predicted to win, with Clinton grabbing the lead in most of the key battleground states.
The media’s confidence in a Clinton win was bolstered by The New York Times’s Upshot that projected early Tuesday evening that she had an 84% chance of winning. Oops!
As the evening wore on and the late votes began to come in, the tide suddenly turned. One by one the states that Trump needed to win came into the fold—Florida, Ohio, North Carolina. That gave Trump a fighting chance, shocking the media. And then came the death knell—Pennsylvania, which Republicans haven’t won since 1988, and Wisconsin, which was last captured by Ronald Reagan in 1984, fell to Trump, poking a hole in the “blue wall” and sending Hillary Clinton to defeat.
During the campaign, the media and Trump have had a love-hate relationship. Trump loved the media when they said positive things about him and hated them when they didn’t—even going so far as to ban certain members of the media from campaign events for their negative coverage. For their part the media loved covering Trump during the primary, as he drew huge crowds and viewer interest, propelling the cable news networks to their best overall ratings in years. Yet once Trump became the nominee, the media banded together to stop him from winning the presidency in one of the most blatant chapters in the history of liberal media bias. It was so blatant that Politico founder Jim VandeHei even admitted last month that reporters have become biased against Trump—a remarkable admission from someone who had previously thought accusations of media bias were overdone.
Now that Trump has been elected, the media will need to figure out how they can mend their fences with him, after working so hard to defeat him. That won’t be an easy task, as Trump proved that he didn’t need their support to win and he doesn’t need their support to govern.
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Morning Joe co-host Joe Scarborough called the media “disgusting” Friday morning for accusing him of supporting GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump on his show. Scarborough was discussing Trump’s rising poll numbers on the show when he went after the media:
“Now in case you have a short attention span, right. In case you’re like that dude in Memento and you need to take a Polaroid every 5 seconds to figure out where you are. Take a Polaroid right now and write these words on your wrist. Joe’s not saying this is going to happen, Joe’s saying it might happen. It might happen, it could happen. Along with Nate Silver I think there is a 35% chance that it will happen.
Have you taken the Polaroid yet? Have you put it right here? (pointing to his wrist) Because I don’t want you to think three minutes from now that anybody here is rooting for Donald Trump because we’re not. Because this is impossible, this will never happen. God, you people. You need to do your job and be journalists. You’re really disgusting.”
Scarborough earned the liberal media’s wrath when he blasted them for “freaking out” after Trump refused to blindly accept the upcoming election results. He called them hypocrites, since many liberals are still claiming that George Bush stole the election in 2000. Scarborough also criticized the media for waging an anti-Trump campaign.
The media also seem to have forgotten that Scarborough has challenged Trump to prove that he isn’t a bigot, and criticized him for his treatment of Alicia Machado, among the many less than favorable comments he has made about the GOP standard bearer.
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In an interview with the Financial Times, New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet called out Fox News and CNN for pandering to a particular audience in their coverage of Donald Trump, saying that they were “bad for democracy and those institutions” in the long run.
Baquet criticized CNN for hiring former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, describing him as a “political shill.”
He was far more harsh on Fox News of which he said, “at its heart is not a journalistic institution.” He said that while Megyn Kelly and Chris Wallace were great journalists, the network “is some weird mix of a little bit of journalism, a little bit of entertainment, a little bit of pandering to a particular audience.”
Baquet told the Financial Times that Trump’s campaign had forced his paper to re-evaluate its approach to political coverage. “We are used to warring philosophies, but this is different. This is a guy who makes stuff up. I am not opposed to his presidency, that is not my job. But my job is not to beat around the bush when a candidate lies.”
That same scrutiny hasn’t always applied to Hillary Clinton, whose lies are being exposed daily by WikiLeaks.
CNN Worldwide president Jeff Zucker has defended its hiring of Lewandowski by saying that the network lacked someone to speak up for Trump during political discussions, and that they didn’t have anyone when the campaign began. He added that no one complains about Democratic political contributors with ties to Clinton.
As for Baquet’s criticism of Fox News, he showed his bias by only praising those who have been particularly tough on Trump, while ignoring other journalists who have covered the campaign in a more even-handed manner.
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Former Major League baseball player and ESPN analyst Curt Schilling will join conservative news website Breitbart on Monday, according to a report by New Yorkmagazine’s Gabriel Sherman.
Schilling is best remembered for pitching game 6 of the 2004 American League Championship Series for the Boston Red Sox, against the New York Yankees, with a bloody sock that has become part of baseball lore for gutty performances. He has also been known for his outspokenness on social media, which has endeared him to many on the right.
That bluntness, combined with his support for Donald Trump, makes him a good fit for Breitbart.
‘‘He got kicked off ESPN for his conservative views,’’ Breitbart editor in chief Alex Marlow said of Schilling. ‘‘He’s a really talented broadcaster.’’
Schilling will host a daily online radio show featuring political commentary and calls from listeners, and it will eventually include livestream video.
The show may also serve as a platform for Schilling as he prepares a potential challenge to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) in 2018.
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During a radio interview last Friday, CNN’s Jake Tapper was asked about reports that then-CNN contributor Donna Brazile had shared questions she obtained with the Clinton campaign, in advance of a town hall forum .
“It’s…very, very troubling. Look, I have tremendous regard for Donna Brazile. She’s a good person and a nice person and I like her a lot but whatever took place here…and I know I had nothing to do with it…and I know CNN, we were so closely guarding our documents…they weren’t ever emailed around. I think this was a follow-up question that Roland Martin was going to ask theoretically.”
Tapper went on to say that they wanted to ask Clinton a tough question about her support of the death penalty after CNN had found a prisoner who had been freed from death row, thanks to the Innocence Project, and that finding out that someone was tipping off the Clinton campaign was “very, very upsetting.”
This all came to light in a WikiLeaks email dump that revealed an email from Brazile to Clinton campaign communications director Jennifer Palmieri on March 12 that contained the following question about the death penalty:
“19 states and the District of Columbia have banned the death penalty. 31 states, including Ohio, still have the death penalty. According to the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, since 1973, 156 people have been on death row and later set free. Since 1976, 1,414 people have been executed in the U.S. That’s 11% of Americans who were sentenced to die, but later exonerated and freed. Should Ohio and the 30 other states join the current list and abolish the death penalty?”
CNN has said that it didn’t share the questions ahead of time with Brazile, and she has denied forwarding any questions to the Clinton campaign. CNN has tried to shift the blame to Media One, its partner for the town hall, and co-moderator Roland Martin who asked the death penalty question nearly word for word.
Tapper backed that up by saying it was his understanding that the email was sent to Brazile by Martin or someone on his staff, and that the whole episode was “horrifying:”
“It’s horrifying, journalistically it’s horrifying, absolutely and I’m sure it will have an impact on partnering with this organization in the future,”
The media continue to refer to the WikiLeaks emails as “alleged,” but there has been no denial from the parties involved about their authenticity.
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