Fake News: Three Mainstream Media Lies on Trump’s First Day

The mainstream media lost no time in attempting to undermine President Donald Trump, as opposed to actually reporting information.

After eight years of kowtowing to Obama, they have suddenly discovered a civic responsibility to hold the government accountable. But they are focusing on minutiae, and in some cases actually telling lies, both of omission and commission. That risks alienating the public even further — making it harder, actually, for the media to act as watchdogs.

Lie #1: President Trump was focused on the crowd size at the inauguration. He mentioned it in passing in his speech at the CIA, and Press Secretary Sean Spicer took the media to task for trying to downplay attendance figures. But to say — as CNN’s Anderson Cooper did — that crowd size was Trump’s focus on his first day in office is simply absurd. On Cooper’s program Saturday, CNN played a clip of Spicer’s first press conference that only mentioned the crowd size issue — leaving out Spicer’s preceding comments taking a journalist to task for reporting, falsely, that Trump had a bust of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. removed from the Oval Office. The crowd issue was secondary — but CNN chose to focus on it because it was less of a slam-dunk against the media than the bust. Whatever the numbers on Inauguration Day, Spicer’s point was that the media were more interesting in undermining Trump, and promoting anti-Trump protests, than in covering the actual news of the day.

Lie #2: President Trump insulted the CIA. Extending the faux outrage at Lie #1, the mainstream media criticized Trump for talking about crowd size in front of the CIA’s memorial wall for agents who have died in the course of their duties. The media showed considerably less concern when President Barack Obama spoke before the same wall about the release of the prior administration’s interrogation memos, impugning the integrity of the CIA and giving valuable intelligence to terrorists.

Lie #3: The anti-Trump protests in Washington, D.C. were important. The protests were nothing more than the venting of outrage at Trump’s election. For all the talk of “women’s rights,” there was nothing particular to point to that Trump had done about anything relating to women. The demonstration was large, but also disorganized, as well as vulgar, and protesters left heaps of trash over the various routes they took, including protest signs abandoned at Union Station as they left the capital.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He was named one of the “most influential” people in news media in 2016. His new book, How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.