The rest of the book’s evidence consists of Kurtz expressing indignation at what is actually fair coverage. Kurtz conjures the image of reporters celebrating openly at the travails of Steve Bannon - they “practically broke into cheers” and then, three pages later, were “practically high-fiving.” These imagined acts of bias have to substitute for his inability to describe actual ones. Martin (who previously worked for National Review) vociferously denies that this occurred. Citing a Republican official, he claims New York Times reporter Jonathan Martin cursed out Trump as “racist and fascist” in a private conversation. There is only one nugget of original reporting to bolster Kurtz’s accusation, and it is almost certainly false. Kurtz nevertheless fails to produce them. Given how many stories have been written about Trump, statistics would suggest it should be easy to produce a fair number that clearly indicate bias. Perhaps that makes it a little easier for him to write those words. Indeed, it is a prerequisite for retaining his Fox News salary. “These are not easy words for me to write.” Luckily for Kurtz, his radicalization happens to dovetail with his change of employer. I am increasingly troubled by how many of my colleagues have decided to abandon any semblance of fairness,” he tells his readers. In Kurtz’s telling, his unmitigated embrace of the right-wing line is one he arrived at sadly and reluctantly. In 2013, Kurtz was fired from the Daily Beast for what editor Tina Brown called “serial inaccuracy.” That same year he moved to Fox News. Kurtz had been a somewhat right-leaning journalist for CNN and the Daily Beast. Instead he devotes his attention instead to media bias against the president. He does not consider the theory that a decades-long propaganda campaign by the conservative movement, and his employer in particular, to discredit non-party-controlled media has had any bearing on this reality. Kurtz, like Trump, presents the Republican base’s distrust of mainstream media as a decisive indictment. These journalists believe they should try to report as objectively as they can anyway. To the extent Kurtz offers a theory as to why it’s wrong for the media to report on Trump’s falsehoods, it’s that Trump’s voters don’t like it when they do: “What many journalists fail to grasp is that Trump’s supporters love his street talk.” Most journalists I know do realize that Trump’s supporters are willing to forgive almost anything he says or does, in part because they get their news from propaganda organs that supply them with a worldview designed to encourage such thinking. Kurtz does note that reporters often “call Trump a liar … was repeated like a mantra, as an established fact.” Is it a fact? Kurtz does not explore the question. And so the strange mission of his book is to analyze the hostile relationship between Trump and the mainstream news media without in any way acknowledging that Trump lies on a historic scale, or has in any other way departed from the historic norms of presidential behavior. He treats this premise as definitionally true - not defending it outright, but simply building his case as though no other explanation could even theoretically exist. To Kurtz, however, the “massive imbalance” between Trump’s coverage and coverage of other presidents can only be explained by media bias. The Stormy Daniels news virtually disappeared. If it were revealed that another president had paid hush money to a porn star shortly before the election, you’d hear about nothing else for months. Terrible stories about Trump are simply elbowed out of the news by other terrible stories about Trump. His administration produces so many errors, scandals, reversals, eye-popping meltdowns, and outright lies that it would be impossible for reporters to cover each of them the same way they would cover the same behavior under a normal presidency. And yet it is simultaneously true that Trump is held to a more lenient standard than any other president. It is clear enough that Trump receives worse coverage in the mainstream news media than any other president since the invention of nonpartisan news. It shows instead how unfairly the media has treated the 45th president. The episode, in Kurtz’s telling, has nothing to do with the administration’s lying. Kurtz does not at any point quote the Spicer line - “This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period” - that became so notorious Spicer performed a parody of it at the Emmy Awards. Indeed, he barely touches upon the claim at all, which occupies just one sentence, and which his readers only learn about through his quoting a reporter barraging Trump’s spokespeople with rude questions. Kurtz, though, does not mention that Spicer’s claim was untrue. Trump’s War On The Media Has Been Years In The Making
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