Liz Peek: Media vs. Trump, coronavirus — here's what they hate the most

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Trump says media want him to fail

By saying economy should remain shut down.

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Democrats are apoplectic. The coronavirus has delivered the economic downturn they hoped would derail President Trump, but the collapse in jobs and stock market swoon are failing to produce the desired result. Far from being demolished politically by the crisis, President Trump has risen to the occasion and looks stronger, not weaker, as the weeks go by.

Instead, COVID-19 is destroying honest journalism. The liberal media’s coverage of the president’s response to the crisis has become even nastier than normal, and, also, misleading. Some now refuse to even cover Trump’s daily briefings on the virus. They are unhinged.

A Gallup poll released in recent days put the media at the bottom of all institutions’ response to the coronavirus; only 44 percent of respondents approved of their coverage, as opposed to 88 percent who thought our hospitals are doing a good job, and 60 percent who thought Trump was handling the crisis well. Don’t think for a moment that such negative reading will alter the #Never-Trump jihad.

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Critics charge that Trump’s near-record approval ratings are being boosted by his daily appearances on television, as he leads briefings by the coronavirus White House task force. The liberal media is irate that the president sometimes uses this platform to congratulate his team (and himself); in fact, some media outlets have decided to drop coverage of the events altogether.

Imagine: in the midst of a national emergency, KUOW, an NPR member station in Seattle, decided it would no longer air the briefings, setting off considerable soul searching by the earnest liberals in charge of our national public radio. KUOW said it didn’t want to broadcast the events because they were characterized  by "a pattern of false or misleading information provided that cannot be fact checked in real time."

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Please remind me: when has any government been “fact checked in real time?” When President Obama claimed you could “keep your doctor” under ObamaCare, did NPR pronounce that a lie, as the White House knew? When Hillary Clinton pretended a video was responsible for the Benghazi attack that killed four Americans, was NPR there in real time to correct the record? Certainly not.

KUOW maintains that its decision was not influenced by politics. Who is fact-checking that claim?

Note that those briefings attract on average 8.5 million viewers, about the same, the Times points out, as the season finale of “The Bachelor.” That figure does not include millions more watching over the Internet.

The other evening the task force laid out practical details on how low-income families could apply for expanded food stamps, as a result of the stimulus package. The people in Seattle who depend on KUOW never received that information. For shame.

Margaret Sullivan, a columnist with the Washington Post, has called for the media to cease broadcasting the White House briefings, claiming they are full of “exaggeration and outright lies.”

Sullivan knows what she’s talking about. Explaining one beef she had with the briefings, she relates that, “When NBC News’s Peter Alexander lobbed him a softball question in Friday’s briefing — ‘What do you say to Americans who are scared?’ — Trump went on a bizarre attack. 'I say you're a terrible reporter.'"

She leaves out the part that came before, in which Alexander asks whether the president is giving Americans a “false sense of hope” by discussing possible treatments for the virus. It was the kind of “gotcha” question that is commonplace today, and it did, indeed, set Trump off.

That the liberal media hates President Trump is nothing new. But that their venom would so taint their coverage of a national emergency is stunning. 

CNN was criticized recently for displaying a graphic on air contradicting President Trump’s claims that the U.S. was now testing 100,000 people daily, “more than anybody in the world.” CNN’s chart compared tests on a per capita basis, which showed that South Korea, using that matrix, was in the lead. But that was not what the president said.

Nicholas Kristof, co-wrote an article recently in the New York Times saying that “President Trump says he wants the United States ‘raring to go’ in two and a half weeks, on Easter”; as anyone who actually watched the briefing knows, that is not true. On the contrary, the president said he would “love” to have the economy reopen by Easter; yes, wouldn’t we all?

More recently, the estimable Dr. Deborah Birx, coordinator of the task force response team and formerly employed by the Obama White House, has come under fire for innocuously noting that President Trump “has been so attentive to the details and the data, and his ability to analyze and integrate data has been a real benefit during these discussions about medical issues…” That did not sit well with New York Times’ columnists, who described Birx’s remarks as “gushing.”

Anyone who has actually watched the president over the past few weeks cannot doubt that he has thrown himself into this battle; that he might dig into the numbers is no surprise. But, to the Times, even hinting that Trump is not a total buffoon is cause for condemnation.

That the liberal media hates President Trump is nothing new. But that their venom would so taint their coverage of a national emergency is stunning. One might have hoped that in this crisis, the nation would come together. Surely, we fight stronger when we are united.

That is why China and Russia are lodging disinformation campaigns against the U.S., trying to undermine our faith in our government. The media’s constant assault on the president could achieve the same end.

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The press especially hates that President Trump is an optimist. That is who he is. Nobody but an extreme optimist would have jumped into the 2016 presidential race, despite never before having run for any political office.

Call me crazy, but my experience is that it is the optimists among us who actually accomplish things. His positivity drives Trump forward, drives him to win; it will also, eventually, conquer this terrible disease.

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