{"id":2328,"date":"2017-05-14T08:44:03","date_gmt":"2017-05-14T08:44:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/?p=2328"},"modified":"2017-05-14T08:44:03","modified_gmt":"2017-05-14T08:44:03","slug":"trump-outsmarts-the-media-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/?p=2328","title":{"rendered":"Trump Outsmarts the Media, Again"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><em>Source: Accuracy in Media<\/em><\/strong><br \/>\nBy Cliff Kincaid on May 10, 2017<br \/>\nNobody does it better than President Donald Trump. That is, drive the media crazy. And The Washington Post has gone nuts in reacting to the firing of FBI Director James Comey.<br \/>\nRemember that Comey botched the Hillary email and Trump\/Russia investigations, using in the latter the discredited \u201cTrump Dossier\u201d of gossip that the anti-Trump intelligence community couldn\u2019t even verify.<br \/>\nComey was in over his head, as we demonstrated in part one of our series, \u201cThe final Truth about the Trump Dossier.\u201d He had to resign or be fired.<br \/>\nIn addition, Trump blew the whistle on the Russia probe, noting in his firing letter that Comey confirmed that Trump was NOT under investigation. Trump said \u201c\u2026I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation\u2026\u201d<br \/>\nNevertheless, the Post is convinced that the firing means that Trump is guilty as hell and has dug his own political grave. Look at the headlines from Wednesday\u2019s \u201cPost Most\u201d list of \u201cpopular\u201d columns:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Firing FBI director Comey is already backfiring on Trump.<\/li>\n<li>It\u2019s only going to get worse.<\/li>\n<li>After Trump fired Comey, White House staff scrambled to explain why.<\/li>\n<li>John McCain on Comey firing: \u2018There will be more shoes to drop\u2019<\/li>\n<li>In the wake of Trump\u2019s brazen firing of Comey, it\u2019s time to go nuclear.<\/li>\n<li>Here\u2019s how.Jeffrey Toobin went ballistic about Trump and Comey. It was great TV.<\/li>\n<li>If Trump fired Comey over Russia, he must go<\/li>\n<li>The Comey debacle only magnifies the Russia mystery<\/li>\n<li>The shocking firing of James B. Comey puts new pressure on Trump and his team<\/li>\n<li>Trump is mirroring Nixon\u2019s final days<\/li>\n<li>Firing Comey is a thuggish abuse of executive power<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I am not sure this is an exhaustive list. I listed several that stood out as noteworthy. It is hysteria bordering on mental illness. There isn\u2019t even a pretense of an objective analysis of the facts in the case.<br \/>\nAs we noted in part one of our series on the phony dossier, \u201cIt appears that the only significant Russia connection the media have left out is the story that Accuracy in Media first broke in 2015 when we revealed retired Lt. General Michael T. Flynn\u2019s attendance at a public conference in Moscow with Russian president Vladimir Putin.\u201d<br \/>\nOne big factor in the Post\u2019s hatred of Trump is the role played by Post columnist David Ignatius in getting an illegal leak of classified information about Flynn. The paper wants desperately to divert attention away from the fact that Ignatius can be prosecuted under the law.<br \/>\nAs we noted, \u201cWhether Flynn disclosed the entire story about his Russian contacts remains to be seen. The matter is irrelevant to the far more serious issue in Flynn\u2019s case, namely the illegal disclosure of his wiretapped conversations to CIA mouthpiece David Ignatius of The Washington Post. Unraveling how and why this occurred could shed light on the Watergate-style surveillance that President Obama or his aides authorized on the Trump campaign and how the political intelligence was shared with Hillary\u2019s operatives in the bureaucracy.\u201d<br \/>\nOne of the above cited Post columns, \u201cThe Comey debacle only magnifies the Russia mystery,\u201d is by Ignatius. He calls developments a \u201cdark tale\u201d and claims that the mission of a new FBI director \u201cwill include investigating Trump himself.\u201d Yet Trump says Comey confirmed that the FBI is not investigating the President.<br \/>\nIn fact, a new FBI director should investigate Ignatius and his CIA-connected employer, Amazon\u2019s Jeff Bezos.<br \/>\n\u201cAlready,\u201d says Ignatius, \u201ccongressional pressure is building for an independent counsel\u2014which is the most sensible way to restore a measure of public confidence after this debacle.\u201d<br \/>\nThe lack of confidence is in the media. And the Post doesn\u2019t even seem to know or care.<br \/>\nAs we argued in our column, \u201cInvestigate and Prosecute the Press,\u201d since it\u2019s doubtful that Ignatius will volunteer his testimony and reveal his sources, a subpoena would be necessary. We pointed out, \u201cHe can then be prosecuted if, as expected, he conceals the names of those who used him as a conduit for illegal leaks of classified information.\u201d<br \/>\nTrump is the elected President. He had the legal right to fire Comey for incompetence and other flaws outlined in Department of Justice memos. There is no evidence of any illegal activity by Trump, and the President says that Comey cleared him.<br \/>\nThe evidence of illegal activity lies with the Post and its anonymous sources in the intelligence community. Publishing a hundred or a thousand anti-Trump columns cannot change this basic fact.<br \/>\nThe paper should try to bring some basic standards of objectivity and fairness back to its coverage of the Trump administration. Otherwise, it will continue to be outwitted by Trump and his Tweets. The history of journalism has taken a \u201cdark\u201d turn with a paper whose promise under Trump became \u201cDemocracy Dies in Darkness.\u201d<br \/>\nWe predict the coverage will go from hysterical to laughable, since Bezos can underwrite this kind of material forever. The problem is that the paper\u2019s liberal writers don\u2019t seem to know the difference. At least it\u2019s entertaining. It is a journalistic meltdown on public display.<br \/>\n<strong>Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism and can be contacted at cliff.kincaid@aim.org. View the complete archives from Cliff Kincaid.<\/strong><br \/>\n&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Source: Accuracy in Media By Cliff Kincaid on May 10, 2017 Nobody does it better than President Donald Trump. That is, drive the media crazy. And The Washington Post has gone nuts in reacting to the firing of FBI Director James Comey. Remember that Comey botched the Hillary email and Trump\/Russia investigations, using in the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":2329,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5777],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2328","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-features"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2328","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2328"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2328\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2328"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2328"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2328"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}