It's hard to argue with Payne about this. It seems that the liberal media, as well as others, have taken on the role of Chief Inspector Dreyfus to Donald Trump's Inspector Clouseau. The mere thought of Donald Trump seems to induce in them a completely mindless, irrational malice and rancor.
Those in the media suffering from this affliction can't seem to help themselves, nor can they seem to focus on things that matter. They panicked like Chicken Little when he talked tough to Kim Jung Un, fretting that Trump would unleash nuclear war. North Korea backed down from their threats against Guam, and the media, rather than acknowledging the fact, quietly shoved the whole business down the memory hole.
Nothing much appears to be coming of Robert Mueller's Russia investigation either, although there's plenty going on with Hillary's emails and Debbie Wasserman Schultz's inept dealings with nefarious IT people, but despite having promoted the "collusion with Russia" meme 24/7 for almost the entire year, the media is now ignoring it. Any failure gets prominent attention and becomes the subject of much ridicule, any success, and there've been quite a few, gets shunted to the media equivalent of Siberia.
So what's now occupying their attention instead? Like a kitten mesmerized by a laser dot on the carpet the media is fixated on Trump's claim that there was blame to be found on both sides of the awful events in Charlottesville and that "fine people" and bad people were on both sides of the protest. The former assertion is undeniable. The latter, not so much. As of this writing there's no good evidence of any "fine people" on the side of the white supremacists, but even if the president is completely wrong about this, it's hardly the sort of error that merits the hysterics we've been witness to from MSNBC, CNN and sundry other commentators over the past week.
If you think "hysterics" is too strong a word, consider that a state senator from Missouri was driven so far out of her mind by Trump's press conference that she declared she hoped someone would assassinate the president. But perhaps I'm giving her the benefit of the doubt here. For all I know, she was actually in her normal state of mind.
Others, less vicious but equally ridiculous, are calling for his impeachment. This would be a novel development: impeaching the president of the United States because he claimed that both left and right in Charlottesville were responsible for violence. Someone should enlighten these knuckleheads to the fact that they can't impeach a president just because he says things they don't like.
In the body of his article Payne elaborates on the semi-insanity rife in the media this week:
The furor surrounding the press conference stemmed largely from one particular line Trump delivered. When one reporter asked about his claim that there had been “hatred [and] violence on both sides,” Trump replied: “Well I do think there’s blame. Yes, I think there is blame on both sides. You look at both sides. I think there is blame on both sides.”This evidence hasn't been very widely publicized by our fourth estate because it contradicts the narrative they wish to purvey which is that the protestors were ugly Nazi brown-shirts and the counter-protestors were gentle clergy, nuns, and grandparents. In fact, the eyewitness testimony gives a fuller picture of the composition of the counter-protestors and the violence they inflicted that the progressive media has largely, but not entirely, ignored:
With that unremarkable assertion, the media were off. “HE STILL BLAMES BOTH SIDES,” CNN blared in enormous font on its front page. In a headline, The New York Times blared that Trump “again blames ‘both sides.” So did the Chicago Tribune. So did NBC News. So did U.S. News and World Report (calling it “an insane press conference” to boot). So did NPR. So did CBS News. So did the Washington Post. So did the Wall Street Journal. So did Time. So did MSNBC. So did USA Today. NBC News later wondered: “Has Trump Lost His Moral Authority for Good?” CNN continued with the massive headlines, calling Trump’s press conference “a meltdown for the ages,” and declaring: “Trump is who we feared he was.” Vox claimed Trump “is offering comfort to racists and extremists.”
The unambiguous implication of this media firestorm is obvious: we are supposed to see it as outrageous at best and morally abhorrent at worst that Trump would claim that “there is blame on both sides.” The thing is, Trump was telling the truth. There is blame on both sides. And we have eyewitness descriptions and photographic evidence to back it up.
New York Times reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg, for one, attested: “The hard left seemed as hate-filled as alt-right,” she tweeted. “I saw club-wielding ‘antifa’ beating white nationalists being led out of the park.” If there were any doubt as to whether the Left were committing violence that day, Stolberg later clarified: “[I] should have said violent, not hate-filled.”
Another eyewitness report comes from Isabella Ciambotti, a creative writing major from the University of Virginia [who was herself a counter-protestor]. Speaking to The New York Times, Ciambotti testified that at one point “a counterprotestor ripped a newspaper stand off the sidewalk and threw it at alt-right protesters.” Photographic evidence confirms Ciambotti’s account.
Raw footage of the moment the counterprotestor threw the box is inconclusive but strongly suggests the counterprotester was unprovoked at the time. Further raw footage shows counterprotesters hurling objects at white supremacists and neo-Nazis while the latter simply stand there a good distance apart from the crowd.
Ciambotti also claims to have witnessed “another man from the white supremacist crowd being chased and beaten.” Additionally she saw “a much older man, also with the alt-right group, [who] got pushed to the ground in the commotion. Someone raised a stick over his head and beat the man with it.” Ciambotti claims to have intervened before the beating could continue further.
According to Jake Tapper of CNN the leftists also physically assaulted journalists who tried to record the violence.
Payne continues:
The fact that our media dedicated an entire news cycle to Trump’s truthful statement on the matter is staggering. This was not necessary. There were plenty of things the media could have criticized in Trump’s press conference. He asserts, for instance, that “very fine people” marched with the white supremacists and Nazis, people “that were there to protest the taking down, of to them, a very, very important statue.”Truth and objectivity are very difficult to espy in our current political reportage. Too many editors, journalists, talking heads and television news producers have adopted a pragmatic understanding of truth that justifies them to themselves when they tell only one side of a story. They've embraced the post-modern notion, widely held on the left, that truth is whatever works to achieve one's purposes. If the purpose is to discredit and ultimately remove Trump from office, then any account of events which accomplishes that goal is justified and "true" regardless of how well it corresponds to the actual facts.
Maybe this is true, but there is no evidence that the statue protest was made up of anything other than paranoid racists. Trump should not have made this statement unless he was willing to provide proof to back it up.
Yet he also told the press: “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally.” This, according to Vox, constitutes Trump “offering comfort to racists and extremists.”
Trump makes a lot of mistakes. Some are minor, some major. In that, he is like every president who has ever held the position. Sometimes he gets things right, too—-as he did blaming the Charlottesville street violence on “both sides.”
Payne concludes with this:
The media’s responsibility, if it even cares anymore, is to learn how to tell the difference between the things he does right, the small mistakes he makes, and the big blunders he commits. Currently the media are apparently incapable of telling the difference between all three: it’s one and the same to them, no matter what he does, no matter what he says.Those last few sentences are certainly true, and maybe that's the whole point - weakening the bonds of fellowship and friendship between common Americans.
This is a dismal situation for Americans to be in. We have newsmakers whose only professional function these days seems to be whipping tens of millions of people into angry, irrational frenzies. They do not seem to care about the truth. They do not seem to care about honesty, integrity, or accuracy. We are lurching from one shrieking, insane media episode to the next. And it is wearing on all of us, and weakening the bonds of fellowship and friendship between common Americans.