Howard Kurtz: Trump call to Ukraine is troublesome, but does it justify impeachment?
'MediaBuzz' host Howard Kurtz weighs in on the released transcript of the phone call between President Trump and the Ukraine president and how it mostly corroborates the mainstream media reporting.
It looks like Trump-hating journalists are getting their dearest wish — the beginning of impeachment proceedings against the president.
The media have been clamoring to remove Trump from office since he was elected. Here’s a great compilation of just a few examples across 35 months.
When the anti-Trump media weren’t promoting impeachment, CNN was pushing what anchor Wolf Blitzer called “questions about the president's mental fitness” and 25th Amendment solutions as another way to oust Trump.
CNN SHAMES GOP SENATORS WHO 'NEED MORE INFO' ON TRUMP-UKRAINE CONTROVERSY
Now they will do anything they need to support any effort to send Trump into political retirement. That includes either skipping stories that undermine the impeachment effort or censoring massive chunks of text to manipulate the result.
Remember when we had the missing 18-minute gap in the Watergate tapes? Now we have the missing 540 words of the Ukraine transcript. The big difference is the media complained about the first gap and created the second gap all their own, to establish a phony narrative about President Trump asking the Ukrainian president for a favor.
I credit the word tally to The Federalist, which analyzed the transcript against the narrative manufactured by the press. The site pointed out how journalists jumped from the Trump’s initial request in the call “to do us a favor” all the way down to a completely separate section where he wanted to “talk about Biden's son.”
What Trump was actually asking about in the “favor” section was computer hacking and a company named Crowdstrike. The Biden stuff came later.
The press didn’t care. Journalist after journalist flat-out lied about what Trump said. MSNBC, CNN, NPR. It didn’t matter the outlet, they pushed the same narrative.
MSNBC anchor Katy Tur was one of the worst. (Shocker, I know.) She just made up what Trump said and viewers who didn’t check the transcript would have easily been deceived. She claimed Trump asked: “Will you do me a favor and investigate Vice President Biden’s son? Will you do me a favor and get involved in the 2020 election? Vice President Biden is my chief political opponent.”
In fact, Trump said nothing about the election or Biden being his opponent. He commented how “Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution,” which is true. (Here’s the video.)
That didn’t stop Blitzer, who explained the situation this way: “In the ... this summary that was released by the White House, the president specifically quoted as saying to the Ukrainian president, ‘I would like you to do us a favor’ and then goes into an investigation into the Bidens and the Democrats.” Blitzer skipped over the same words as the others.
Broadcast news was no different. “CBS Evening News” Chief Congressional Correspondent Nancy Cordes used a nearly identical synopsis of the call: “Mr. Trump asked the president of Ukraine for a favor, to look into campaign rival Joe Biden, and Biden's son Hunter.”
And when journalists weren’t making up their own fictional accounts, they were largely ignoring the made-up accounts of Hill Democrats. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., fictionalized the call during the hearing and few in the press even noted it.
Schiff said: “I'm going to say this only seven times, so you better listen good. I want you to make up dirt on my political opponent, understand, lots of it.” Fact-check obsessed reporters didn’t care.
That’s because the media are thrilled. MSNBC host Chris Matthews told “Morning Joe,” "they've got him!" That’s their mindset. Not news.
Live by the tweet …
You’ve probably never heard of Cancel Culture, but you’ve seen it happening all around you. Essentially, it’s when the Internet mob and some media outlets gang up on people to try and destroy their lives.
Newer lefty outlets like BuzzFeed have popularized it, but major media outlets do it, too. Which brings us to the Des Moines Register’s attempt to destroy the life of 24-year-old Carson King. The Iowa State football fan and beer drinker held up a sign saying “Busch Light Supply Needs Replenished” during ESPN’s “College GameDay.” He included a link to send him money and, remarkably, people did just that.
He was given so much money that he decided to donate it to the University of Iowa Stead Family Children’s Hospital. Corporate support soon followed — including Anheuser-Busch — and the total topped $1 million.
AXED DES MOINES REGISTER REPORTER BLAMES 'RIGHT-WING IDEOLOGUES' FOR FIRING, SUGGESTS HE'S OPPRESSED
The Register decided to profile King. Reporter Aaron Calvin dug into King’s tweets to find inappropriate comments he made when he was 16. King was remorseful, but that wasn’t good enough for the Register, which included the old tweets in its profile.
King beat them to the punch and held a press conference apologizing. The story came out and many on Twitter were unhappy, to say the least. The Register went into damage control mode. It released a statement explaining the story process and saying “editors decided we would include the information.”
Twitter users soon uncovered that Calvin – the reporter who wrote the story – had his own offensive tweets, including a version of the N-word. The Washington Post described those comments as “troubling posts that mocked same-sex marriage, made light of abuse against women and used a racial slur.”
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Readers were furious. Register Executive Editor Carol Hunter wrote another piece headlined: “We hear you. You’re angry. Here’s what we are doing about it.” She told readers: “We took appropriate action.” Only they didn’t. They blamed the reporter and didn’t apologize for what they did.
According to Calvin, they told him he could quit or be fired and he chose to be fired. Hunter and others at the paper suffered no consequences for their decision to attack King over a few high school comments.
Now Calvin is whining to BuzzFeed, one of the worst advocates of Cancel Culture. According to BuzzFeed: “‘Now that gay marriage is legal,’ he wrote in one 2012 tweet, ‘I’m totally going to marry a horse.’” He also wrote “f---- all cops,” without my polite editing.
But Calvin said he feels “abandoned” by the newspaper, since “the editor knew, the editorial board knew, and the executive editor knew” how he handled the tweets. Naturally, he blamed conservatives for costing him his job, saying “this whole campaign was taken up by right-wing ideologues and largely driven by that force.”
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Look for more outlets to lionize Calvin, if only to justify their own similar attempts to destroy conservatives over ancient comments.
King gets to have the last laugh. Much of the world sided with him and his charity efforts have now topped $2 million. And the only person canceled was the one who tried to cancel him.