By Becket Adams
Sunday, September 15, 2024
Members of the press increasingly have no idea what conservatives believe.
What’s different now is that, apparently, members of the
press also have no idea what the Democratic presidential nominee believes.
Take, for example, the treatment of Donald Trump’s
performance last week in his debate against Vice President Kamala Harris. The
former president lobbed several serious allegations at his opponent, including
that she supports taxpayer-funded sex changes for illegal immigrants and
abortion with no limitations, even up to the moment of birth. Trump also
referred to an incident in which a chunk of downtown Seattle was overtaken by
far-left agitators cut from the same cloth as the rioters Harris supported during
the 2020 anti-police riots.
On each count, Trump was challenged and “corrected,”
either in real time by the debate moderators, ABC News’ David Muir and Linsey
Davis, or afterward by a national press that is about as ignorant as it is
overconfident.
The funny thing is that on each of the above counts,
Trump is correct. The journalists are wrong. Is this a display of ignorance or
outright dishonesty? Take your pick.
“[Harris] wants to do transgender operations on illegal
aliens that are in prison,” Trump said. “This is a radical left liberal that would do this.”
At the New Yorker, which boasts of an unusually
thorough and rigorous fact-checking process, journalist Susan Glasser asked in
her postdebate column, “What the hell was he talking about?”
“No one knows,” she declared confidently.
CNN, which reported last week on Harris’s support for sex changes for
illegal immigrants, knows. People who read Andrew Kaczynski’s KFile on the CNN
website or saw him on Erin Burnett’s show know. The news sites that piggybacked onto CNN’s exclusive reporting know. Most of all, the American
Civil Liberties Union, to whom Harris professed her support for taxpayer-funded sex changes for
illegal immigrants in custody, knows.
Other than that, a great question from the New Yorker,
the home of the supposedly rigorous fact-check.
Meanwhile, Time magazine, which is known less for fact-checking
and more for being the type of publication to include Evelyn Waugh on a list of
the “100 Most Read Female Writers in College Classes,” declared in its
postdebate coverage that “Trump glowered and grimaced, spewing old grievances
and strange new attacks. The former President . . . falsely claimed that Harris
‘wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens in prison.’”
The story carries three bylines. Three reporters, and not
one of them bothered to do the bare minimum required of their profession (and
this is to say nothing of the editors and web producers who likewise didn’t
catch the bogus “fact-check”).
At the Atlantic, the same false reporting.
“Donald Trump said some strange things, even by his own
standards,” said staff writer Ali Breland. “[He] falsely suggested that
Kamala Harris wants to do ‘transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in
prison.’ This is not merely the stuff of normal Trumpian discourse. This is the
stuff of someone who is merely spending way too much time on the right-wing
internet.”
Time eventually corrected its reporting. Now, the
story bears an editor’s note, which explains that, as a presidential candidate
in 2019, “Harris filled out a questionnaire saying she supported
taxpayer-funded gender transition treatment for detained immigrants.”
The Atlantic likewise affixed an editor’s note to
its coverage, conceding that the thing that sounded insane to its staff writer
is a thing Harris actually supports.
Elsewhere, Trump attacked Harris for being a radical on
abortion, referencing her party’s often implicit and sometimes explicit support
for abortion at any time during pregnancy.
“They have abortion in the ninth month,” the Republican
said. “They’re radical. The Democrats are radical in that. And her
vice-presidential pick . . . says abortion in the ninth month is absolutely
fine. He also says execution after birth, it’s execution, no longer abortion,
because the baby is born, is okay.”
To all of this, Davis retorted flatly, “There is no state
in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it’s born.”
Between January 1, 2019, and December 31, 2022, the
Minnesota Department of Health recorded eight cases in which infants were born
alive during abortion procedures. None of the children survived, the department
reported.
More specifically, five born-alive cases were reported
between January 1 and December 31, 2021. In those cases, the Minnesota
Department of Health said “no measures taken to preserve life were reported” for three
of them.
Later, in 2023, Minnesota governor Tim Walz signed
legislation repealing nearly all of the language of the 2015 Born Alive Infants
Protection Act and much of the language of the state’s original 1976 statute
protecting born-alive infants. The bill also overturned many of the state’s
abortion reporting requirements, including reporting on born-alive infants, reports the Dispatch’s Alex Demas.
Minnesota currently has no statutory limitations on
abortions at any stage of pregnancy.
While we’re on the topic, it’s worth noting that nine
states and the District of Columbia likewise have no gestational limits on
abortions. In the nation’s capital specifically, a woman can get an abortion at
32 to 36 weeks. And for good measure, via the University of Utah: “If a fetus reaches 32 weeks gestation
and you deliver at 32 weeks gestation, your preemie’s chance of surviving is as
high as 95 percent. Their chance of dying during infancy and childhood is also
very low.”
Most relevant of all, Davis asked Harris specifically,
“Would you support any restrictions on a woman’s right to an abortion?”
Harris never answered the question, and Davis never
bothered to follow up. It’s no wonder why, considering Davis does not appear to
know what Harris and the Democratic Party support or what is and isn’t legal in
the states.
At another point during the debate, Trump asked, “When
are the people that burned down Minneapolis going to be prosecuted or in
Seattle? They went into Seattle, they took over a big percentage of the city of
Seattle.”
To this, the Seattle Times put out a “fact-check”
with the tweet, “Trump falsely claimed during the presidential debate Tuesday
that protesters took over a big portion [of] Seattle during the Capitol Hill
Organized Protest in 2020.”
The “fact-check,” written
by staff writer Vonnai Phair, rests on the premise that an area covering six to
eight blocks, which is the approximate size of the “zone” occupied by lawless
activists, is not that big. We’re talking about an area that
included businesses, a public park, and residential complexes. Also, the
activists took over a police station.
Meanwhile, at CNN, “fact-checker” Daniel Dale declared
that, in his preliminary count, Trump “made at least 33 false claims,” whereas
Harris made only one.
Oh, come on. Even the laziest student knows you must
fudge the numbers a little to make the cheating less obvious. And what was the
single false statement? That Trump left the White House “with the worst
unemployment rate since the Great Depression.”
As for Harris’s claim that a reelected Trump would follow
the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 (he and his campaign, which had nothing
to do with the policy document, have repeatedly disavowed it), that he will
create a department specifically to “monitor” pregnancies and miscarriages (he
has not endorsed this), that he threatened a “bloodbath” if he loses reelection
(he threatened no such thing; he was speaking about the
future of the U.S. auto industry under a potential second Biden
administration), and that law-enforcement officers died on January 6 (no police officers died on January 6, and the one
law-enforcement death most commonly attributed to the riot was ruled as being
unconnected to the events of that day, according to the chief medical examiner
in Washington, D.C.) — well, CNN couldn’t summon the energy to review those
claims, let alone rate them.
Harris also falsely claimed that Trump supports a
national abortion ban (he doesn’t), that he wants to ban IVF (he doesn’t), and
that “nowhere in America is a woman carrying a pregnancy to term and asking for
an abortion” (CDC data show thousands of abortions are performed annually
after 21 weeks of gestation; the data don’t include statistics from Maryland,
New Jersey, New Hampshire, and California, so the actual number is likely
higher than even what the CDC reports). But who’s counting falsehoods anyway?
This is where we are.
Trump gets fact-checked in real time on national
television, while Harris’s boosters in the press don’t even know what she
supports, let alone fact-check her on anything.
Is it ignorance or lying?
If it’s ignorance, I’m not sure who looks worse — Harris,
for supporting such insane policies, or the exceptionally accommodating press,
whose reaction to being exposed to the Democratic nominee’s extreme positions
was to assume they’re made up.
And if they’re lying, what good are they as journalists?
No comments:
Post a Comment