Oh you’ve got to be kidding me. After Trump pulled a fast one on the media, duping them into giving him about 20 minutes of free airtime, with Medal of Honor recipients, veterans, and retired generals giving remarks that praised Trump and noted the national security challenges we face. Katie wrote about this event earlier today, as did Justin. This press event was called because we’re back to the old birther nonsense again, which was diffused when these veterans showed what the real issues were in this election. Donald Trump eventually took the stage and said that Obama was born in the United States, which took less than three minutes to declare. Well, of course, the press went nuts.
In another instance of media hysteria, CNN’s Ashleigh Banfield was disturbed that cheers erupted when Trump said that the press would be late to his campaign even in New Hampshire last night. She noted her concerns to fellow media reporter Dylan Byers.
“Do people not realize, or are they forgetting that other critical element of it, either you have a media or you have what I witnessed in Saddam’s era, in Libya’s era, where you never got to actually called yourself press or you’d go to jail for it,” she said.
Byers said it’s a timely event since a new Gallup showed that faith in the media has reached an all-time low, with Trump taking credit for being a driving force in that trend. Republicans have also contributed to the faith in media figure plummeting, with less than one-third of Americans trust the news media to report on events accurately. He added that when you get people cheering the restrictions on media, it strikes at the very foundation of our government—and the press’s job to hold both Democrats and Republicans accountable.
Banfield then went into an anecdote where she said her driver told her not to stare at Saddam Hussein’s palace when she was in Iraq, noting that they were on a freeway when this happened.
“So, there’s the other side of this,” she said.
Frankly, for a news organization that flubbed their Boston Bombing coverage, and one that obsessed about a missing airline for so long that they ventured into the absurd—they can shut up about Trump cheering the press being late the campaign event. Comparing this to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq? Are we on bath salts? Americans think the media sucks. That’s not Donald Trump’s fault. These low faith numbers are a long time coming.