I'm a Trump supporter so take this with a grain of salt.
When he said the media was dishonest, he was referring to CNN, WaPo and the mainstream media (excluding Fox News). Anyone who follows Trump know these are the folks he's referring to. If he didn't like ALL of the media, he wouldn't even have a press corps. Reuters isn't really engaging with what Trump's saying.
Are Trump's claims substantiated? I would say, Yes.
During the last election cycle, anybody who knows anything about the DNC leaks, Podesta emails, CNN feeding Hillary questions during townhall meetings against Sanders, Hillary's gliding past the FBI investigations, "bleaching" her email servers (which were under subpoena), Bill Clinton's unprofessional meeting with Loretta Lynch... knows that there's some serious corruption happening at the top of these major news companies.
As a litmus test... the fact that almost every liberal in America is yelling at Trump more than they're yelling at the DNC (and Debbie Wasserman Schultz) shows the state of mainstream media. The DNC sabotaged Bernie Sanders nomination, and he was the only candidate that would have a chance of beating Trump (a very high chance since he had young vote). When the DNC sabotaged Sanders' nomination, and doubled-down on Hillary the loss wasn't just technical––it was a landslide[1]
Mainstream media is really broken in America. There really needs to be a breakup of corporation-owned news companies. It really is a swamp in Trump's idiom.
>the loss wasn't just technical––it was a landslide
1984 Reagan/Mondale, Reagan gets 59% of the popular vote and 98% of the electoral college -- that is a landslide. Trump getting 46% of the popular vote and 56% of the electoral college sure doesn't seem like a landslide.
> doubled-down on Hillary the loss wasn't just technical––it was a landslide
Is this your first election? Consider even just the last one: Obama vs. Romney. Obama performed far worse than he did in his previous election, and it was absolutely no landslide. Maybe 2008 was a landslide, but not 2012.
Yet in 2012 Obama won more electoral votes than Trump (332 instead of 304), and won the popular vote by 3.9%, instead of losing it by 2.1%.
Trump won, yes, but the idea that it was a landslide is patently foolish, and makes the rest of your message weaker. If you're so easily misled on the details, why would I have any confidence in your bigger picture?
Bernie supporter here, so obvious bias, but the way they (CNN, Fox, etc.) talked down to Sanders in the primaries was disgusting, so I have to agree there. However, the trump administration wasn't attacking Fox news which I think we can all agree from an objective standpoint is several times worse than CNN in their distortion of the truth.
Can you give examples of Fox distorting things? I gave many examples of issues that the MSMs didn't seriously cover.
I don't believe that there isn't "true" objective coverage but Fox News with Hannity and Carlson are really providing coverage that is sharp, and enlightening. They're actually informing the public instead of participating in the media churn.
How about Fox News reporting that the Canadian mosque shooter was a Moroccan Muslim who chanted allah Akbar while murdering people at the mosque? In fact he was a white Canadian citizen self described trump supporter.
To my understanding they didn't retract their erroneous position for more than 24 hours after accurate details were known. Many of their listeners still believe the shooter was a Muslim immigrant. Trump's press secretary, knowing this falsehood is widespread, has cited this incident as a reason to support the travel ban. The level of disinformation that comes from Fox News approaches that of Russian state run media.
Fox didn't invent that claim - Radio Canada reported it[1], and so did CBC. Of course, this claim was wrong, but it's not Fox's fault for repeating Canadian reporting the words of eyewitnesses. Of course, eyewitnesses are often unreliable so one has to be careful not to take it as the final truth. That applies to every "hot news" reports from any source.
And certainly Fox is not responsible for anybody in the government using this claim to justify anything - they could as well use it if Fox didn't exist at all, since it was reported by the Canadian source.
Well -- none of the American so-called "biased liberal media" reported that false fact.
You are wrong to pretend this incident is an isolated case of biased reporting. It's part of a pattern of deliberately misleading reporting from Fox News that obscures the truth or over represents what is known.
If the media is biased to liberal side, it would be very reluctant to report on crime committed by somebody yelling "Allahu Akbar", at least this particular detail. In this particular case it worked to their favor, since the report turned out to be false. That doesn't mean the bias is good, it just means in one case this bias accidentally filtered out false information. There are plenty of cases where the same filter filtered out true information and passed on false information.
BTW, Reuters reported the same too[1]. So did The Times in UK[2]. Not exactly bastions of Republicans.
> You are wrong to pretend this incident is an isolated case of biased reporting.
I'm not pretending anything of the sort. On the contrary, I am clearly stating this is not an evidence of Fox being biased, but of Fox relaying information from a reliable source, which they had no reason to suspect was wrong, but still turned out to be wrong. It happens.
If Fox reported "somebody committed a mass shooting, must be a Muslim" - without any evidence - that would be biased reporting, inventing facts with no basis. Making a mistake is not a proof of bias, per se - unless there's a pattern of mistakes that always points in one direction regardless of the evidence. Then it's the definition of bias.
You simultaneously argue that liberal bias accidentally filters out this mistaken report from left wing outlets, without acknowledging that fox's bias plays a role in poor framing of unverified salacious details that they are strongly motivated to publish -- and publish they do, early and regardless of accuracy, when it supports their desired narrative.
This is absolutely a pattern in their reporting - one of many ways in which they misrepresent events.
I honestly can't believe I have to argue the case that Fox News is a biased media outlet -- the argument has been made by better people than me in far more depth. I don't think Fox itself would even deny they are biased...
I would argue that presenting one (obviously biased) view as the ground truth would qualify as distortion. For example, consider how Fox reports news regarding separating religion from public, tax-funded institutions, such as removing the 10 commandments from schools, as infringements on religious freedom.
Of course, liberal news organizations distort the truth as well.
There's been studies showing people who watch Fox are uninformed. I actually think they're half decent this election cycle, completely unlike the Pravda they were for Iraq/GWB, but they publish more misconceptions and lies than the others (I do not believe for a second WaPo or CNN are unbiased)
I don't know why you're getting downvoted, it's a good question. I am not a fan of trump, but I also want to see and verify examples of Fox distorting things.
What you're saying is anedoctal. Ultimately, Fox News were the few news organizations that knew that Trump was going to win by a landslide. Every other news organization were all singing that Hillary had a 99% chance of a victory (I'm not being hyperbolic with the 99%).
Nate Silver has taken a major beating from pretty much everyone in the press when he put Clinton's chances as something like 2/3 IIRC (don't remember the exact number, but it was high, but not as high as 90%). Lots of pundits all around were berating him for being contrarian for the sake of being contrarian and inflating Trump's numbers just to draw attention to himself and so on and so forth - right up to the day Trump won. I don't remember any measured ones with 60%. Of course, I can't claim I've seen them all. Which ones were?
I saw a ton of liberals yelling at the DNC. Before the election, they were upset that they mistreated Bernie. After the election, they were upset that it handed the victory to Trump.
It has faded away, but that's only because more important things are going on. Trump is an immediate threat to the nation in ways the DNC could never be.
How is Trump an immediate threat? I'm really curious. All of his policies are about protecting American interests, and rebuilding America's manufacturing complex.
If you're referring to the Immigration EO... please read it first. It's a really well-written bill. For those curious about whether it was a religious discrimination see this pie chart of the Muslims that are excluded[1]. The goal of the EO is to mitigate the influx of refugees from states that foment anti-Western ideals. It just happens to be this group are radicalized, and violent Islamic people.
> The goal of the EO is to mitigate the influx of refugees from states that foment anti-Western ideals. It just happens to be this group are radicalized, and violent Islamic people.
I don't understand this reasoning. Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, to take only two examples, are also places where a lot anti-Western activity comes from, both in ideology (via jihadist religious schools), and logistic support. If what you say is true, they should have been included in the ban.
Equally illogical is Trump's argument [1] that they couldn't take the time to consult the relevant parties from Justice, State, and Congress because that would have meant "the "bad" would rush into our country" before the EO's enactment. How does that not apply to the Muslim countries left out, like the two mentioned above, whose citizens have been the source of documented attacks on U.S. interests multiple times in the past (as opposed to the 7 countries included in the order)?
Trump is a more long term threat due to the long term fallout and international perception of the United States as a result of his actions.
Yes, his Immigration related EO does not affect nearly as many people as the rhetoric would indicate -- but what it does do is prevent travel to the United States for some 22,000 persons (and counting) at the very least while, by consensus, not really being likely to prevent entry to actual terrorists. It is not that the bill is truly discriminatory, just that it is likely to be ineffective in its aims while damaging international credibility of America as a land of inclusion (or, to rely on imagery from the plaque of the Statue of Liberty, a golden door, to accept your tempest-tossed refuse).
Second, while his threat of 20% tariffs on importation from Mexico may seem like it originally promotes "buying local", there are several long term ramifications. First, construction materials and machinery [1] for American factories will ultimately increase the price of American produced goods as a result of this measure. Second, this bill will, directly and immediately, grant China greater bargaining power--with the United States. Thirdly, it causes Mexico to negotiate more aggressively with its local neighbors and with overseas partners, potentially closing trade avenues altogether with America.
Ultimately, it boils down to one thing: Trump's measures appear to be reactionary, with little view for long term fallout, international reputation, and future trade relations with partners that are not directly related to his current target (eg: trade relations with Mexico deteriorating, giving China greater negotiating power).
> Yes, his Immigration related EO does not affect nearly as many people as the rhetoric would indicate
It potentially affects, well, everyone, really: while much focus has been on the effect of the refugee ban and the 90-day shutdown from named countries, the order directs certain executive officers to determine information that foreign countries (all countries, not just the specific ones addressed by the 90 say ban) must share with the US regarding potential immigrants and orders that those officers provide recommendations of countries that should be added to an immigration ban list because they do not share the required information.
So it impacts all potential immigrants to the United States, and all third parties (including US citizens about whom a foreign government has information) about whom (because of direct or indirect relationship ship to a potential immigrant) the US might demand information from a foreign government as a condition of allowing immigration from that country.
No, you're wrong. You can preempt intentions of a bill. A bill is a bill. If Trump wants to overreach he'll have to introduce another bill. This bill is specifically to curb nations that have been havens for radical Islamic people.
The E.O. is not a bill, and no new bill would be required to implement the parts of it that I related. (Well, it might be legally required just as new legislation might be legally required to do what is called for in the 90-day ban, which is being challenged as a violation of existing law; but that's an after-the-fact constraint that doesn't prevent overreach, it just potentially provides a basis for responding to it, provided the courts are doing their job more faithfully than the President is doing his.)
There's always going to be some unwanted effects of any kind of legislation. I agree that those are bad side effects... but you have to look at the general thrust of the legislation: curbing unwanted immigrants to America. There's no deterministic way to discover whether someone has terrorist sentiments... so a blanket statement is used. It's sloppy but accomplishes the goal, no?
Reactionary? Yes, I agree. Trump's most shining quality is that he acts quickly. Obama didn't accomplishing this much in his 8 years, as Trump has in 2 weeks... I would anticipate he has a very lean and agile approach to legislation and everything is subject to iteration.
Obama's inability to get much done can be, objectively, attributed largely to an obstructionist Congress. While not wholly to blame, it certainly both slowed his agenda, and often caused him to gut key provisions from legislation in order to get it ultimately passed. Looking at initial drafts of the Affordable Care Act early in its history versus what ultimately passed Congress is a depressing reminder of how willing Democratic partisans are willing to compromise their values in terms of playing ball with an enemy team whose explicit, stated, and recorded goal was paraphrased to "Take the other side's ball and go home."
While many bills have unintended consequences and side effects, these are often not recognized at the time. Pointing out the negative consequences for people who have already passed American vetting procedures, preventing access to persons already in flight when it passed, detaining persons in airports immediately, and the failure of the bill to provide any tangible benefits as far as anti-terrorism measures are concerned were hardly unforeseen. These were immediately pointed out by security professionals.
I am still of the hopeful and optimistic opinion that Trump does not use his "very lean and agile approach" to unilaterally void NAFTA and impose a 20% fee on Mexican imports, as just the foreseeable consequences of that action are far reaching, negative, and highly deleterious to the United States' reputation internationally. The unforeseen consequences? The economic fallout that we cannot immediately predict? If they are mere extensions of what we already can see, I am afraid.
"Looking at initial drafts of the Affordable Care Act early in its history versus what ultimately passed Congress is a depressing reminder of how willing Democratic partisans are willing to compromise their values in terms of playing ball with an enemy team..."
They made no attempt to compromise on the ACA. They didn't need to -- they passed it with zero GOP votes in the House and almost zero in the Senate. They didn't even let Reps or Senators see the bill before the vote!
>Obama didn't accomplishing this much in his 8 years, as Trump has in 2 weeks
This may be an accomplishment for people who wants immigrants out, but not for America or everyone. Also, what i hated most about that particular EO is that, it also bans people with Green cards and student visa's. There are numerous students who were stopped and detained which doesn't make any sense, but again this is what you get when you want to act fast without thinking through.
I say time will tell how this step affects things in general.
I would point out, 9/11 hijackers were all here on legal visas[0] - so using that thinking is faulty. Our visa process seems to have faults, and I think this EO is a stop-gap to try to amend the issue. I don't particularly agree with ever choosing "religion" or "race" as a litmus test (which, as I have seen seems to be the underlying motivation, right from the horses mouth), but you have to agree there is justification at closer scrutiny of some sort for visitors coming from known hot-bed countries.
I think from certain angles, you could argue Trumps response hasn't been strong enough (why wasn't SA included in that list; everybody tends to agree that is completely absurd)?
I'm reminded of the old proverb: "Do not remove a fly from your friend's head with a hatchet". Banning thousands of people who haven't done anything and may actually help our cause, just to prevent a few dozen people who may be able to find other means to get in the country if they had to anyways, is not a smart policy.
There hasn't been anything like another 9/11 attack since and we've had 16 years, so maybe two Presidents and all of our allied governments with the same policy know more about what to do to keep the country safe than a two week old presidency.
I don't think that contradicts the other comment. They said that the hijackers all entered legally. You're saying that some didn't have legal status on the day of the attack. Both are true. That some of them overstayed or didn't meet the terms of their visas after arrival is interesting, but not very actionable unless you want to set up an internal passport system or something.
Sure it does; "were all here on legal visas" is false.
That some of them overstayed or didn't meet the terms of their visas
Even those that did have legal paperwork all obtained it via fraudulent means by lying on their applications as to purpose of visit; technically speaking, none was here legally.
The point was that ignoring people with visas would not be compatible with a goal of keeping terrorists out. I (and I think the other commenter) don't think it's a good idea or worthwhile, but it does fit the stated goal.
>Obama didn't accomplishing this much in his 8 years, as Trump has in 2 weeks
Err, no.
He has put out some Executive Orders, and done some hiring and firing. Even that has been enough to massively damage his Administration, such is the level of decision-making that we've seen so far.
I seem to recall Obama passing a rather major health care reform. Trump hasn't done anything nearly that big yet.
What you describe as a "lean and agile approach to legislation" appears to be not bothering with legislation at all. Has there been any legislation passed during the Trump administration yet? I certainly haven't heard of anything big.
I read the EO first. It pretty clearly excludes people who should have the right to be here, including people on work and student visas, and permanent American residents. The White House has since walked that back a little bit, no doubt due to the massive backlash, but the order itself is clear enough, and the order continues to block people who should be allowed to come here.
I don't know what "well-written" would mean here, but it's not a good order by any means.
The threat posed by Trump goes far beyond this, though. Right now, my hope is simply that we're all still alive to vote again in 2020. I'm quite serious about that. Trump has shown himself over and over to be highly insecure, obsessed with revenge, and unable to let any slight slide without a response. Put such a person in charge of the world's most powerful military and there's a good chance of a catastrophe.
Ignoring the threat of nuclear annihilation, there's also the threat to the foundations of our democracy. He constantly attacked our electoral system and refused to commit to accepting the outcome of the election. We didn't find out how he would have handled losing in 2016, but how would he handle losing in 2020, or hitting the 22nd Amendment in 2024? I wouldn't be at all surprised if he refuses to leave and precipitates a crisis.
There's plenty more, for example his offhand desire to strip American citizenship as punishment for flag burning, but those are the two main ones that concern me.
Though if you read Art of the Deal or have studied how Trump operates, his initial position on anything is always more than he wants. So they "backpedaled" on green cards and legal visas and still have what they really wanted.
But that's not how democratic leaders are meant to act, that's how dictators act.
I feel like America is selling its birthright - a democratic republic - for the illusion of security. It's been happening ever since 9/11 but now it's even worse.
No, that's not how dictators act. How dictators act is they do what they want and if you resisted, they put you in jail or kill you. Dictators don't need negotiating tactics because negotiation is part of democratic process which requires consensus. Dictators don't negotiate, they dictate.
Consensus ... crowd pleasing ... dictators can do that. The hallmark of the dictator is their disrespect for individual rights, but you can totally please a crowd while stepping on individual rights, see Chavez:
Consensus and crowd pleasing is not the same. And dictators aren't usually as good at pleasing the crowds as they think they are, otherwise there would be no need to suppress freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of elections, etc. which dictators (including Chavez, of course) routinely do.
And if anyone running things in the Trump administration actually knew the law, or history, they'd understand that treating people equally no matter what country they came from is not negotiable. You can't run a government like a business deal.
I disagree with the EO, and reading it fully I think the green card issue was more of a lack of experience on how to govern. It was clearly rushed out with little planning.
The reason I bring this up, is that Trump has plethora of issues that do not need embellishment. Hyperbole will do nothing but make Trump supporters dig further in and reaffirm their beliefs. A woman on my FB feed the other day said that as a woman, she was likely to have her right to vote taken away by the next election. That type of comment does nothing but make people think 'crazy liberal'.
Maybe I'm overreacting but as a green card holder myself, the cavalier attitude this administration has to people's lives fucking terrifies me.
I don't want to go on vacation and then find I can't get back into America (where I have a job, a mortgage, a spouse, a social network and have lived for the past 9 years) because Trump suddenly took a dislike to my country of origin.
I'm not even from a Muslim country, but we have some Muslims, and plenty of non-white people, so given that Bannon was partly behind the EO and is openly white nationalist, who knows?
You are not overreacting. It's unnerving that a two-week old administration isn't willing to listen to anyone in their own government, or in our allies, and just thinks they know best. If they had people with experience, they'd understand just how much this policy messes with people's lives, and for no real benefit.
I don't know the future, but it is important to remember that the list of countries came from a failed nation list made by congress and the Obama administration (they also included Iran) [1]. Trump did not just pull it out of the air.
Green cards are also permanent residences so legally that is much harder to stop than not extending or granting new visas.
With that said, I'm against it and think it is bad policy on many fronts.
It was not lack of experience, it was deliberate, and only rolled back due to protests. After the order was put out, DHS decided that it didn't apply to green card holders. The administration then clarified that it did, and that's when SHTF as it were:
It's not at all clear that his policies do anything to accomplish that goal. His executive order on immigration was quite likely counterproductive to American interests. Sure, it disrupted travel for a large number of people that had already been through a thorough vetting process (the claims that doing this made us safer are weak, the existing vetting process was effective, people who went through it had killed 0 people in the US), but it also made the US look foolish and capricious.
What worries me about the EO is how incompetent it was, and his running excuse that terrorists would just jump into planes to fly to the US if they heard about it first! That's nuts and it's the beggining of an excuse for him to do this over and over again, eroding the ability of Congress to vet his actions. "There's no time" does anyone actually believe that?
I am not blind to Trump's virtues. Economically he has a lot of good ideas. I agree that PC was going too far! But he's a lying son of a gun who's trying to screw us all.
Can you point me to some concrete examples of times CNN or WaPo has been dishonest? Not counting editorials.
> The fact that almost every liberal in America is yelling at Trump more than they're yelling at the DNC (and Debbie Wasserman Schultz) shows the state of mainstream media.
Plenty of liberals in my liberal social media bubble were yelling at the DNC and DWS when they were doing news worthy things. But why should we still be? Trump is now the one doing things we think harmful.
CNN said “it’s illegal to possess these stolen documents [the Hilary emails from wikileaks]. It’s different for the media. So everything you learn about this, you’re learning from us.”
Thats fake and a lie, and they were exposed quickly about that.
Yes, sometimes the media can say something that's not true. But this example was immediately pointed out by, guess who, the rest of the media. And it was a kind of weird thing to be wrong about too, so it seems more likely that the speaker genuinely believed they were telling the truth as opposed to being dishonest (I mean, who does it benefit to be dishonest about that? Nobody). Though that doesn't excuse the fact that they really should have double-checked that before saying it. They absolutely were wrong, and they absolutely deserved to be called out by everyone else.
But even if they were dishonest that one time, one example, no matter how widely-reported, indicates systemic dishonesty.
I listed several examples in my comment. CNN for sure did not cover these issues proportionately to their gravity. These were serious issues that were skirted by them.
Had they been responsibly covered, public sentiment would be more favorable towards Trump... since he's really been rapping on this MSM corruption for a while. If anything, Trump is at least an iconoclast and whether you like his policies it would at least command respect.
>CNN for sure did not cover these issues proportionately to their gravity.
This is a very reasonable statement, but ultimately does not encapsulate the rhetoric that has been levied against the media by Trump specifically, nor his more ardent supporters.
Not covering proportional to gravity is not:
Anything similar to lies, fabrications, false news, misconstruing the news, or presenting the topic with a completely false narrative.
While it does certainly affect the narrative, and while CNN gives far more weight to articles favoring the left, this does not hurt Trump in any way as far as his getting elected was concerned. At the very least, the song played by the left leaning MSM (and that is a VERY IMPORTANT distinction, as Fox News represents the right leaning MSM; their viewer numbers have them as a larger body than CNN--how would they not be the true MSM?) lulled many Clinton supporters into a false sense of security. The post-election meltdowns by people who claimed they did not vote directly as a result of this false security, while anecdotal, points directly at that narrative.
And even if you allow that CNN reports on left leaning issues in a positive light while decrying conservative viewpoints, and Fox reports on right leaning issues positively while pointing out the issues in progressive topics, one cannot use them as direct opposition to each other, as neither tends to focus both on the positives and negatives in an issue in a way that could be considered equal. Equal airtime doctrines have also caused a negative skew, but that is another topic altogether.
The amount of attention given to an issue is just as relevant as lying, because it's even more responsible for which candidate someone will vote for. People are more persuaded by what they see and what their attention is drawn to than the cold facts.
Humans are not "rational" and pretending they are doesn't give you a moral high-ground.
Thank you. Misjudging the proportional "gravity" of an issue is not equivalent to lying. But when affect has replaced logic as the value system you use in evaluating media, then I guess it is.
Because of strong media polarization in the cable television news sector, coverage -- while it will show up on both sides of the fence -- will be prioritized to one topic or another entirely depending on politics. So MSNBC spent a huge amount more time exploring the Access Hollywood tapes / Russian hacking angle regarding Trump, while Fox News will cover Clinton's email scandal more.
This is not exactly surprising. I wouldn't call this "corruption". Having an opinion / bias is not corruption.
I will say that from a personal perspective, I find all of American cable news fairly awful, and one of the reasons is this "gotcha" fatigue when it comes to their outrage cycles. At some point, it's hard to figure out what is really a genuine fault and what is just some tabloid fluff designed to get the viewer demographic angry. This especially applies to the "gotchas" that devolve into outright wild conspiracy, such as the Podesta emails you reference (devolved into Pizzagate and who knows what else).
Although not my primary news source, my impression is that Reuters is much more sober than the current state of cable news.
Trump's is/was a womanizer. I don't think that's in doubt. While that is a bad quality in a person I would distinguish this from criminal actions like deleting subpoenaed evidence.
Hillary's actions still haven't drawn the coverage that was deserved. A lot of them (see my top-level comment) would individually be deemed a national scandal had it been Trump.
The problem is he's a hypocrite. How can you accuse the media of lying and lie all he time yourself? His IRS lie being the worst. He kept saying he couldn't do it, but that's just a straight lie.
There's a difference between saying "It's my right not to do this thing" and "I can't do that thing". Either can be true or false. In the case of the taxes, he said the latter, and it was false.
That's like asking to point out some concrete examples of humor in the complete works of Mark Twain. It's there, it's everywhere. Asking someone to point out concrete examples is a waste of everyone's time. If you really want these examples (and I don't think you, or the countless redditors who I have seen make this exact same argument, really do) then I would advise you to go read the Washington post or the New York Times. Pick an article at random.
So like, you presume to have access to a set of countervailing facts about reality that any given NYT or WaPo article is dishonest about, whereas Fox or Breitbart gives you the straight take on these facts. But why are you so certain that you are the one with access to those true facts? What are you cross-referencing the Breitbart articles against to ensure their trustworthiness?
I used to watch CNN because I found them somewhat unbiased, but this last election cycle they completely came off the rails. I'll have to find examples, but leading up to the election I was digesting a lot of news and routinely noticed where CNN would leave facts out or let a left leaning guest say something false with zero correction.
So now, I've given up on TV news since MSNBC and FOX are a joke.
> I'm a Trump supporter so take this with a grain of salt.
Immediately predict lame rhetoric about how bad the media is.
> When he said the media was dishonest, he was referring to CNN, WaPo and the mainstream media (excluding Fox News).
Oh right, the bastion of correct reporting, fucking Fox News. Questioning Obama's birth certificate. Warning about his terrorist fist jabs. Rightly admonishing him for asking for Dijon Mustard.
> As a litmus test... the fact that almost every liberal in America is yelling at Trump more than they're yelling at the DNC
The current president vs something that happened 8 months ago.
> doubled-down on Hillary the loss wasn't just technical––it was a landslide[1]
It wasn't a fucking landslide. 13th closest election in history by electoral college, massive loss in the popular vote. This is why Trump supporters need a fucking reality check and should maybe try some of that mainstream media. You are hooked on his propaganda and lies.
Can we stop talking about the popular vote? As long as people know the electoral college is what matters, the popular vote is tainted. People who live in states that are not going to swing either a) don't vote or b) vote their ideal candidate.
HN is a place where we are typically critical of any studies methodology yet we hang on to a number as skewed as the popular vote. Imagine if you were polled and told "No matter what you vote your state is going red/blue. How do you plan to vote?" That is basically the question and it means the popular vote means very little in the end.
> First, tell me the numbers for electoral votes. I would consider that a landslide
Then you don't understand what a landslide, electoral or otherwise, is. Of the post-WWII elections, virtually all were bigger wins, electorally, the exception being both of George W. Bush's elections, Nixon's 1968 election, and Kennedy's 1960 election.
Actually, while WWII is often used as a breakpoint for considering modern elections, the same is true if you extend the timeframe to post-WWI.
If you do, you rob "landslide" of any substantive meaning -- virtually every Presidential election is a "landslide" by that standard, and Trump's is the fifth weakest in 100 years.
I'm having trouble seeing where in your link there is any evidence presented that Obama's birth certificate is forged. It's an article about some guy saying it was forged.
When he said the media was dishonest, he was referring to CNN, WaPo and the mainstream media (excluding Fox News). Anyone who follows Trump know these are the folks he's referring to. If he didn't like ALL of the media, he wouldn't even have a press corps. Reuters isn't really engaging with what Trump's saying.
Are Trump's claims substantiated? I would say, Yes.
During the last election cycle, anybody who knows anything about the DNC leaks, Podesta emails, CNN feeding Hillary questions during townhall meetings against Sanders, Hillary's gliding past the FBI investigations, "bleaching" her email servers (which were under subpoena), Bill Clinton's unprofessional meeting with Loretta Lynch... knows that there's some serious corruption happening at the top of these major news companies.
As a litmus test... the fact that almost every liberal in America is yelling at Trump more than they're yelling at the DNC (and Debbie Wasserman Schultz) shows the state of mainstream media. The DNC sabotaged Bernie Sanders nomination, and he was the only candidate that would have a chance of beating Trump (a very high chance since he had young vote). When the DNC sabotaged Sanders' nomination, and doubled-down on Hillary the loss wasn't just technical––it was a landslide[1]
Mainstream media is really broken in America. There really needs to be a breakup of corporation-owned news companies. It really is a swamp in Trump's idiom.
[1] http://www.politico.com/2016-election/results/map/president