By Daniel Payne
Thursday, August 17, 2017
Our media have a problem: they are essentially incapable
of covering Donald Trump with anything less than full-on deranged hysteria.
I do not say this as an excess of rhetoric or op-ed
theatrics. It is a very real, very pressing problem, only getting worse, and it
poses a significant danger to the social fabric of the United States.
Twenty-first century American media has the ability to shape our discourse and
shift our public consciousness, and it is abusing that power in the worst ways
possible. This is likely a bigger problem than any of us realizes.
The last 48 hours provided a crystal-clear example of the
genuinely dangerous course upon which the media have set themselves. At Trump
Tower on Tuesday, President Trump held a press conference that was initially
supposed to be about infrastructure but quickly went off-script and became
about the Charlottesville neo-Nazi madness.
By itself this is nothing new: Trump regularly goes
off-script, if it can even be said that he has a script. But the media behavior
in the wake of this conference was
arguably something new, a sort of grotesque watermark of the media’s coverage
of the Trump administration thus far.
The furor surrounding the press conference stemmed largely
from one particular line Trump delivered. When one reporter asked about his
claim that there had been “hatred [and] violence on both sides,” Trump replied:
“Well I do think there’s blame. Yes, I think there is blame on both sides. You
look at both sides. I think there is blame on both sides.”
Media Immediately
Jets Into Astral Orbit
With that unremarkable assertion, the media were off. “HE
STILL BLAMES BOTH SIDES,” CNN blared in enormous font on its front page. In a
headline, The New York Times blared
that Trump “again blames ‘both sides.” So did the Chicago Tribune. So did NBC News. So did U.S. News and World Report
(calling it “an insane press conference” to boot).
So did NPR. So did CBS News. So did the Washington Post. So did the Wall Street Journal. So did Time. So did
MSNBC. So did USA Today. NBC News
later wondered: “Has Trump Lost His Moral Authority for Good?” CNN continued
with the massive headlines, calling Trump’s press conference “a meltdown for
the ages,” and declaring: “Trump is who we feared he was.” Vox claimed Trump
“is offering comfort to racists and extremists.”
The unambiguous implication of this media firestorm is
obvious: we are supposed to see it as outrageous at best and morally abhorrent
at worst that Trump would claim that “there is blame on both sides.” The thing
is, Trump was telling the truth. There is
blame on both sides. And we have eyewitness descriptions and photograph
evidence to back it up.
Truth Is Truth,
People
Trump appears to separate the generalized violence of
that Saturday afternoon from the vehicular homicide a white nationalist
perpetrated on Charlottesville’s mall near the end of the whole affair. In the
press conference, Trump stated in no uncertain terms: “The driver of the car is
a murderer. What he did was a horrible, inexcusable thing.”
It is, rather, the periodic violence that occurred
throughout Charlottesville’s downtown area to which Trump was apparently
referring. And he’s right: both sides committed violence on that day.
We know this because people there saw it happen and have
confirmed Trump’s characterization publicly. New York Times reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg, for one, attested:
“The hard left seemed as hate-filled as alt-right,” she tweeted. “I saw
club-wielding ‘antifa’ beating white nationalists being led out of the park.”
If there were any doubt as to whether the Left were committing violence that
day, Stolberg later clarified: “[I] should have said violent, not hate-filled.”
I did not notice any wall-to-wall coverage of Stolberg’s
unambiguous eyewitness testimony. Did you?
Another eyewitness report comes from Isabella Ciambotti,
a creative writing major from the University of Virginia. Speaking to The New York Times, Ciambotti testified
that at one point “a counterprotestor ripped a newspaper stand off the sidewalk
and threw it at alt-right protesters.” Photographic
evidence confirms Ciambotti’s account.
Raw footage of the moment the counterprotestor threw the
box is inconclusive but strongly suggests the counterprotester was unprovoked
at the time. Further raw footage shows counterprotesters hurling objects at
white supremacists and neo-Nazis while the latter simply stand there a good
distance apart from the crowd.
Ciambotti also claims to have witnessed “another man from
the white supremacist crowd being chased and beaten.” Additionally she saw “a
much older man, also with the alt-right group, [who] got pushed to the ground
in the commotion. Someone raised a stick over his head and beat the man with
it.” Ciambotti claims to have intervened before the beating could continue
further.
Ciambotti further asserts:
There were absolutely groups of
peaceful protesters in Charlottesville this past weekend, many making a mature
show of resistance. But what I saw on Market Street didn’t feel like
resistance. It felt like every single person letting out his or her own well of
fear and frustration on the crowd.
These People Don’t
Have Strong Motivations to Lie
Both Stolberg and Ciambotti can fairly be seen as
credible witnesses. Ciambotti, in particular, affirms she was a part of the
counter-protest, yet she directly attests to the violent nature of the liberals
who gathered in Charlottesville that day.
Additionally, Charlottesville police chief Al S. Thomas
Jr. has affirmed that the protest saw “mutually combative” individuals on both
sides. If the police chief who oversaw the mayhem is affirming Trump’s basic
premise, might we assume that Trump is onto something?
It is not unreasonable to blame “both sides” of protesters
that day. Yes, the neo-Nazis and white supremacists showed up preaching vicious
hate, ugliness, and stupidity. Many were armed to the teeth while doing it.
But liberal protesters showed up armed, as well, and we
have unequivocal testimony and footage proving that they committed unprovoked
violence that day. This was not a gentle counter-protest of “passive
resistance;” the Left did not show up to downtown Charlottesville to practice
civil rights-style non-violent activism. They had fighting on their mind. And
they fought.
There Was Plenty
to Legitimately Criticize Here
The fact that our media dedicated an entire news cycle to
Trump’s truthful statement on the matter is staggering. This was not necessary.
There were plenty of things the media could have criticize in Trump’s press
conference. He asserts, for instance, that “very fine people” marched with the
white supremacists and Nazis, people “that were there to protest the taking
down, of to them, a very, very important statue.”
Maybe this is true, but there is no evidence that the
statue protest was made up of anything other than paranoid racists. Trump
should not have made this statement unless he was willing to provide proof to
back it up.
Yet he also told the press: “I’m not talking about the
neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned
totally.” This, according to Vox, constitutes Trump “offering comfort to
racists and extremists.”
Trump makes a lot of mistakes. Some are minor, some
major. In that, he is like every president who has ever held the position.
Sometimes he gets things right, too—-as he did blaming the Charlottesville
street violence on “both sides.”
The media’s responsibility, if it even cares anymore, is
to learn how to tell the difference between the things he does right, the small
mistakes he makes, and the big blunders he commits. Currently the media are
apparently incapable of telling the difference between all three: it’s one and
the same to them, no matter what he does, no matter what he says.
This is a dismal situation for Americans to be in. We
have newsmakers whose only professional function these days seems to be
whipping tens of millions of people into angry, irrational frenzies. They do
not seem to care about the truth. They do not seem to care about honesty,
integrity, or accuracy. We are lurching from one shrieking, insane media
episode to the next. And it is wearing on all of us, and weakening the bonds of
fellowship and friendship between common Americans.
As I write this, the top headline on CNN’s website is:
“This is a moral crisis. And it’s self-inflicted.” That’s true. So what is the
media going to do about it?
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