11/30/2019

Trump Makes The Media Look Like Chumps - Again

The headline reads “Afghanistan Thanksgiving: Trump makes the press look like boobs.

For the U.S. troops abroad, President Trump made a major personal sacrifice by skipping his own Thanksgiving in order to surprise them by helping to serve them theirs. Under cover of secrecy, he flew nearly 7,000 miles, met with them, praised and cheered them, took selfies with them, served them in the chow line, and generally gave the brave fighting men and women in the world's most forlorn hellhole something to smile about. It was a lovely presidential gesture, well in keeping with past presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, who also made holiday trips to cheer the troops.

But unlike them, he also had a goodie for us back home: he managed to expose the press as presumptuous boobs.

Newsweek meant to criticize Trump for golfing on Thanksgiving, which actually would have been an acceptable thing for him to do, given that it was a holiday and every chief executive needs what project managers call "maintenance time."

What’s so remarkable about this? Nothing, really. Hasn’t President Trump been doing this since before he took office, making them report one thing as ‘fact’ when what they reported was nothing of the sort. This time it led to the firing of the Newsweek reporter who originally published the report stating Trump “spent Thanksgiving tweeting and golfing rather than visiting troops in Afghanistan.”

How many other news reports have been of the same caliber as Jessica Kwong’s? How many reporters and/or editors have been sacked for reporting like this? Is Ms. Kwong merely the latest to be canned by her employer? Or has she been the only one because there was no way Newsweek could spin Ms. Kwong’s fake story to mean something different?

I doubt we’ll see too many others “losing their situations” because of sloppy reporting. Otherwise we would have seen most of the staff of the New York Times and Washington Post losing their situations over the past few years.