When a significant portion of the American media decided to give up the attempt to be professional news organizations and instead become a partisan arm of the Democratic Party they forfeited any claim they may have had on the nation's trust. During the Trump presidency some outlets became indistinguishable from supermarket tabloids in their disregard for truth and objective fact-checking.
When President Trump referred to these news organs as "fake news" he may have been impolitic, but he was not incorrect.
The Daily Caller's Brianna Lyman lists eight examples - out of the many that could be listed - of news stories about Trump that were enthusiastically promoted and perpetuated by the liberal media and politicians despite being objectively false.
Here are the eight:
Trump ordered protesters to be tear-gassed for a photo-op: CNN and several leading Democrats, including Joe Biden, pushed this canard, and people still believe it to this day despite an NBC report showing it to be false.
Trump's suggestion that Covid 19 escaped from a Wuhan virology lab was false, racist and had been "debunked" by his own intelligence agencies: It turns out that the theory has not been debunked and is credible.
Trump ignored Russian bounties on US soldiers: Both Biden and Harris criticized Trump for not confronting Putin about the claim that Russia was paying for dead Americans and the Washington Post essentially accused Trump of lying when he denied there was significant evidence to support the allegation. Nevertheless, he seems to have been right.
Trump told Georgia officials to ‘find the fraud’: Trump was accused by the WaPo of telling Georgia's Secretary of State Frances Watson to "find the fraud" and she'd be a "national hero" if she turned up the evidence of cheating. Two months later, the Georgia Secretary of State released an audio recording of Trump’s phone call. It revealed that, based on information provided by an unreliable source, The Post misquoted Trump’s comments on the call. Trump had said nothing about finding fraud nor did he say that Watson would be "a national hero."
Trump said white supremacists were ‘fine people’: This myth has had a distressingly long shelf life despite being patently false.
What Trump actually said was, “Excuse me, they didn’t put themselves down as neo-Nazis, and you had some very bad people in that group. But you also had people that were very fine people on both sides. You had people in that group – excuse me, excuse me, I saw the same pictures you did. You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name....I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and white nationalists because they should be condemned totally.”
Despite the obvious meaning of his words - that many of the demonstrators were not extremists or trouble-makers - the comment is still cited as proof of his sympathies for white nationalists and neo-fascists.
Trump referred to illegal immigrants as ‘animals’: When asked by someone about MS-13 gang members crossing the southern border he replied, “We have people coming into the country … You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are. These aren’t people. These are animals.” He was clearly talking about MS-13, and his description of them is accurate, but liberal politicians and media accused him, falsely and absurdly, of referring to all immigrants.
It's still considered by his critics of evidence of his racism.
Trump lied when he alleged that his campaign was wiretapped: CNN reported in 2017 that Trump “flat-out lied” when he claimed the Obama administration wiretapped Trump Tower before his presidential victory, with CNN citing the Justice Department for proof. “Trump, for his part, has offered zero evidence to back up his initial claim because, as we now know conclusively, there was no evidence. To sum up: The current President of the United States flat-out lied about the then-sitting president issuing a wiretap of his campaign headquarters.”
CNN issued a correction two years later and confirmed that former campaign manager Paul Manafort was wiretapped under a secret court order before and after the election.
Trump removed the MLK Jr. bust from the Oval Office: Just hours into Trump’s presidency, TIME White House Correspondent Zeke Miller reported that Trump had removed the bust of Martin Luther King Jr., from the Oval Office, but it was discovered later that the bust was still there but “obscured by a door and an agent.”
Miller subsequently issued numerous apologies for the error, but once the story was out few people were made aware of the apologies. Even when retractions are issued they're usually a one-time statement that hardly registers with a public which had been subjected to the false narrative being pounded into their psyches for months or years.
The persistence of these myths in our national consciousness is due either to sloppy thinking, sloppy reporting or simple dishonesty by people who earnestly wanted their stories to be true. In any case, one can scarcely be blamed for doubting the credibility or professionalism of anyone or any organization that pressed them incessantly onto the American people.
Lyman's article has more information on each of these eight myths as well as links to the rebuttals.
