Earlier today we wrote about Trump’s extraordinary admission that he was basing military deployment decisions on old Fox News footage and lies from his advisors. But there’s an even mor…

The pattern is clear: mainstream media has become so terrified of appearing biased that they’ve abandoned their basic responsibility to clearly communicate truth to the public. They’d rather hide behind the false comfort of “some say” and “experts disagree” than plainly state obvious facts.

Me: Also, it’s a logical evolution of billionaire controlled media

  • limer@lemmy.mlOP
    16·
    1 day ago

    The smoking gun quote came from Trump’s phone interview with NBC’s Yamiche Alcindor:

    “I spoke to the governor, she was very nice,” Trump said. “But I said, ‘Well wait a minute, am I watching things on television that are different from what’s happening? My people tell me different.’ They are literally attacking and there are fires all over the place…it looks like terrible.”

    This is an absolutely nuclear quote.

    But note that we linked to the local KGW affiliate report on it and not NBC’s. And that’s because NBC didn’t even mention the quote at all in its own coverage. As Dan Froomkin highlighted in his article about all this, NBC ran two stories by Alcindor (with Alexandra Marquez) about her interview with Trump, neither of which mentioned that bombshell of a quote.

    Instead, it was only because NBC apparently sent the full transcript to affiliates that Evan Watson at KGW picked it up and ran a story about it.

    But that raises a ton of questions, including how could NBC and Alcindor not see this as a story? And what is wrong with the mainstream media that it basically skipped over this? The quote is devastating. It reveals a president who is either completely detached from reality, easily manipulated by advisors feeding him false information, or being deliberately deceived by old Fox News footage (as we now know was happening). It raises fundamental questions about who is actually running the country and whether the person with access to nuclear codes can distinguish between television clips from five years ago and reality. As we detailed yesterday, this quote reveals everything about how Trump ended up threatening military action against an American city based on five-year-old Fox News b-roll.

    NBC’s failure to see the story in this is journalistic malpractice of the highest order. When the President admits he can’t tell the difference between Fox News b-roll and reality, that’s not a throwaway line—it’s the story.