I’d like to think that if it weren’t for Roseanne Barr’s remark about Valerie Jarrett looking like a Muslim monkey-human hybrid that we would have spent much of this week still laughing in a resigned way about how liberals and reporters shared Obama-era photos of illegal immigrant children sleeping in cages, having wrongfully thought that they were new images of President Trump’s immigration policies at work.
But that’s not what would have happened, whether Barr had made her comment or not. Whenever the media make shocking accusations about Trump that turn out to be wrong, we’re expected to accept a casual correction and quickly move on.
Many may have forgotten what happened this past weekend in light of the blanket coverage of a TV actress’s tweet, but in short, some journalists and other liberals passed around a news article Saturday on social media that showed how illegal immigrant children are kept in federal facilities when they’re apprehended at the Mexican border in Arizona.
The photos showed kids in metal cages and sleeping on the floor.
A CNN reporter shared the article on Twitter and described the images as the “first photos of separated migrant at [a] holding facility.”
The point behind promoting the photos was obviously to inspire outrage over the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegals (as if Trump wasn’t ever clear about where he stood on immigration during the 2016 campaign, before he was elected) but people eventually pointed out that the images were from 2014.
Then all those tweets disappeared.
This is the kind of thing that happens because there are a set of presumptions baked into the national media’s coverage of the Trump White House, as extensively documented in my book Fraud and Fiction: The Real Truth Behind “Fire and Fury.”
One of them is that Trump doesn’t like immigrants so all coverage of him starts with the premise that he’s doing something dastardly with immigration law enforcement.
Another basic premise that governs media coverage is that Trump is a racist and that’s why on Inauguration Day 2017, Zeke Miller, then a reporter for Time magazine, erroneously alerted his colleagues in the Washington press corp that a Martin Luther King Jr. bust had been removed from the Oval Office upon Trump’s arrival.
That a statue had been removed from the White House wouldn’t be significant if not for the symbolism of a civil-rights icon being swept aside by a president who had spent the last year being called a racist by the media.
The false claim blazed across social media, where journalists live, breathe, and build narratives off each other all day long. Finally, an hour later, a correction was sent out by the White House after Miller alerted it that he had made a mistake. The correction noted that the statue had not been removed and was “apparently obscured by a door” when the media had been in the Oval Office.
A third theme is that Trump is a disrespectful, uncultured idiot so reporters approach their coverage of international diplomacy by first and foremost looking for the president to do anything that would embarrass the U.S.
A media meme was born in November 2017 when Trump visited Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and the two ceremoniously fed the fish in a koi pond.
The two initially flicked spoonfuls of food into the pond before Abe, the host, flung the rest of it from his box all at once. Trump followed Abe’s lead, emptying the rest of his own box in the pond.
Reporters shared video clips of the encounter on social media that appeared to show just Trump crassly and carelessly dumping the contents of his box in the water.
An article on CNN’s website (a place known for its hilarious “facts first” branding) is even now still headlined: “Trump feeds fish, winds up pouring entire box of food into koi pond.”
The article begins, “President Donald Trump took a moment out of his whirlwind Japanese trip to connect with nature and feed some fish, but after a few delicate scoops, he resorted to a grand gesture met with some laughter.”
It says later that Trump “quickly poured his entire box of food into the pond.” Only after that does it acknowledge that Abe “actually appeared to dump out his box of food ahead of Trump.”
“Appeared” is a word you use when you’re not sure. The video explicitly shows Abe leading Trump to dump the fish food.
Yashar Ali, who contributes to New York Magazine and The Huffington Post, tweeted the video clip with the comment, “Trump was supposed to feed the koi by the spoonful with PM Abe but quickly got impatient and dumped the whole box of food into the pond.”
Ali later deleted the erroneous tweet and admitted his error, but why does this have to keep happening over the dumbest issues, whether it’s removing a civil-rights statue from the Oval Office (he didn’t), disrespecting a Japanese ceremony (he didn’t), or calling Meryl Streep “over-rated” (okay, that one he did do and it’s true)?
The list goes on and on — but even if a tweet can be deleted, people can see what the media are doing.
