Establishment media outlets were outraged Tuesday that President Trump dared to assemble a video of their statements and claims about the coronavirus pandemic.
See the video:
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 14, 2020
CNN claimed it “39 most absurd lines,” BBC News said Trump “berated” the media, the Washington Post said he was focusing “on himself,” the Guardian claimed the president turned it into “a presidential tantrum,” USA Today said the president’s briefings “are too dangerous for news media to show them live.”
The Hill, meanwhile, said Trump used the briefing to “fire back.” Bloomberg accused him of doing it “with anger,” and Poynter said it was “off-the-rails.”
An AP reporter editorialized that the president was smiling “slyly” while the video was playing.
Talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh said Trump had to do the video because of the media’s lies. The media repeatedly have characterized the president as waiting too long to act against the virus. Now they say it’s too early to start talking about restarting the economy.
Limbaugh noted that members of the coronavirus task force, including Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx, were saying in January and February that there was nothing to worry about and Americans should carry on with their lives.
“It was the president who shut down flights from China in January,” Limbaugh pointed out, “and they’re running stories, lying stories that were the same lies and the extent of lies that they tried with Trump-Russia collusion and the impeachment fiasco with Ukraine and all of that. Trump had to regain the narrative on this, and he did it yesterday.”
He described the media reaction as a “meltdown.”
“It was nothing but video clips of the media themselves lying and getting things wrong and purposely distorting things. He just zapped ’em. I mean, just exposed them to the world. This is the kind of thing that needs to happen constantly. The American people who aren’t aware need to be made aware what the media is,” he said.
“They’re not media. They are their own political organization that is an adjunct, and maybe even the leader now, of the opposition to the Republican Party. They are not media. Now, people believe that media is journalists gathering news and telling people what they don’t know because they weren’t there. The media goes places, they watch what happens, and then they file reports. They do newspaper stories, they do video reports on the television news and so forth. And so many think they’re getting an objective report on things that happened that they didn’t know about. That’s not what media is anymore, and it hasn’t been that way, in a concentrated way, since Donald Trump was elected,” he said.
“They are not media. And we do ourselves a disservice competitively by referring to them as media,” he continued.
“And while their job title category might be journalists, this is not what they are practicing. What they are practicing is opposition. Whatever Trump is for, they guaranteed to be against it. Whatever Trump is against, they are guaranteed to be for it. Why are they for or against anything? They are media. Their pretense is that they are objective and fair and all of that. It isn’t the case.”
He said the “journalism” taught “at many prestigious universities and prestigious journalism schools” today is “activism.”
“But that doesn’t even get there. They are activists. But they are an opposition force that has to be dealt with and acknowledged,” he said. “The only thing they’re interested in is destroying their opposition, whoever it is at the time, discrediting their opposition. Trump, talk radio, Fox News, you name it. They are not media. And Trump exposed this yesterday. That’s what really happened.”
The video played at the briefing, Limbaugh said, was only “clips of the Drive-By Media saying what they have said about the shutdown, about Trump being incompetent, lying about when Trump did this or didn’t do that and lying about who else had said or not said things.”
CNN and MSNBC both cut away from the briefing.
Trump offered a simple explanation for playing the video.
“We’re getting fake news, and I want to correct it.”
