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‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen such dishonest and biased coverage of any event.” That was Brit Hume, who has been covering events for more than 50 years for Fox News, ABC News and investigative reporter Jack Anderson.
The event was President Trump’s Independence Day speech at Mount Rushmore.
The speech was, according to The New York Times, “dark and divisive,” designed to deliver a “divisive culture war message.” The Washington Post called it a “dystopian speech” and a “push to amplify racism.”
Absent from their stories were quotations supporting racism. Nor did Illinois Democratic Sen. Tammy Duckworth supply any quotations to support her claim that Trump “spent all his time talking about dead traitors.” Trump mentioned no Confederates but did quote the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
President Donald Trump, accompanied by first lady Melania Trump, stand during a flyover at Mount Rushmore National Memorial, Friday, July 3, 2020, near Keystone, S.D. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
The great bulk of Trump’s speech was a celebration of American history, American principles, American leaders. He spoke extensively of the four presidents whose visages were sculpted on the mountain above him and paid tribute more succinctly to others.
BRIT HUME: WHY BIASED COVERAGE OF TRUMP'S MOUNT RUSHMORE SPEECH 'COULD BE A TURNING POINT'
He said: “We are the country of Andrew Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant and Frederick Douglass. We are the land of Wild Bill Hickock and Buffalo Bill Cody. We are the nation that gave rise to the Wright brothers, the Tuskegee Airmen, Harriet Tubman, Clara Barton, Jesse Owens, George Patton — Gen. George Patton — the great Louie Armstrong, Alan Shepard, Elvis Presley and Muhammad Ali.”
Dark and divisive? Dystopian? Amplifying racism?
CRITICS PAN MAINSTREAM MEDIA FOR BRANDING TRUMP'S MOUNT RUSHMORE SPEECH AS 'DARK AND DIVISIVE'
What really seems to have raised the press’ hackles was Trump’s dissent from their reverent attitudes toward Black Lives Matter and apparent indifference to those tearing down statues of Lincoln, Douglass, Grant, abolitionists and women’s-rights advocates.
“Angry mobs are trying to tear down statues of our Founders, deface our most sacred memorials and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities,” Trump said, accurately.
That’s not the message most in the media want voters receiving in the months running up to November. TV viewers have been assured Black Lives Matter protests are “mostly peaceful,” even while fires are blazing fiercely within camera view.
Newspaper readers have been assured that those seizing streets and ousting police are promoting, in the Seattle mayor’s words, a “summer of love,” even as their camp becomes the scene of multiple homicides.
Opinion writers are avoiding mention of the fact that homicides and murders in New York, Chicago and numerous other cities have suddenly risen far above the numbers for 2019 and previous years. Most of the dead are black, but apparently, those black lives don’t really matter.
This may cut uncomfortably close to home, coming just a few weeks after the defenestration of The New York Times editorial-page editor for running an article urging the deployment of federal troops, the same tactic that ended rioting and bloodshed in Los Angeles in 1992 and Detroit in 1967.
For these media denizens, verbal disagreement is violence, while violent rioting is “mostly peaceful” verbal disagreement. They say, or feel compelled by newsroom pressure to say, that Trump is divisive because he’s accusing them, accurately, of being divisive.
During the Charlottesville controversy around the statue of Robert E. Lee, Trump was ridiculed for predicting that statue protesters would target Washington and Jefferson. Well, The New York Times has run opinion articles coming after Washington and Jefferson.
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National Review editor Rich Lowry writes, “I suspect that the very journalists who scoff at Trump’s description of the culture war all know that if they or their colleagues say something disparaging or even skeptical about Black Lives Matter, their jobs would instantly be at risk.”
Hence the dishonest and biased press coverage of Trump’s Mount Rushmore speech.
Expect more in the months to come.
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