The Patriot Post - Alexander's Column 1-9-2019

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The Patriot Post - Alexander's Column 1-9-2019
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The Patriot Post® · Pelosi's MSM 'Wrap-Up Smear' Collusion Against Trump

By Mark Alexander · Jan. 9, 2019 · https://patriotpost.us/alexander/60446-pelosis-msm-wrap-up-smear-collusion-against-trump

“The known propensity of a democracy is to licentiousness which the ambitious call, and ignorant believe to be liberty.” —Fisher Ames (1788)
Just before the November midterm election, in which the Trump administration’s extraordinary record of achievement1 couldn’t prevail over the Democrats’ “Hate Trump2” campaign, the Democrat Party and its Leftmedia propagandists3 repeatedly denounced Donald Trump4 for suggesting that the most blatantly biased elements of the mainstream media were the “enemy of the people5.”

According to Trump, in his brash rhetorical style: “There is great anger in our country caused in part by inaccurate, and even fraudulent, reporting of the news. The Fake News Media, the true Enemy of the People, must stop the open & obvious hostility & report the news accurately & fairly. That will do much to put out the flame of Anger and Outrage and we will then be able to bring all sides together in Peace and Harmony. Fake News Must End!”

When Trump says “fake news” is the “enemy of the people,” he clearly means the enemy of Liberty6, which has sustained our Republic — and, ironically, freedom of the press — since our nation’s inception.

A case in point would be the Leftmedia’s response to his remarks7 this week regarding the humanitarian and security crisis on our southern border8. Many of the Demo public-relations outlets debated whether they would even broadcast9 Trump’s first Oval Office speech.

Trump first referred to the mainstream media’s insidious and fallacious reporting a week after his inauguration in January of 2017, when he opined, “The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!”

But Leftmedia protagonists and their ideological conscripts have no idea what Trump — and grassroots Americans10 living outside the Beltway — mean when they assert that the media’s erroneous and prejudiced news coverage is the enemy of Liberty and, by extension, the enemy of the people.

Regarding Trump’s MSM callout, distinguished journalist Brit Hume observed, “I don’t think the press is the enemy of the people, but I do think the mainstream media have proven themselves to be the enemy of Trump. … There has been more bad and biased reporting such as I have never seen in the 50 years I have been in this business.”

For the record, The Washington Post has never in its history endorsed a Republican for president, and the last time a Republican was endorsed by The New York Times was 1956.

And regarding the Times, according to Jill Abramson (its executive editor from 2011 to 2014), that rag has become “unmistakably anti-Trump.” In her upcoming book, Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts, Abramson slams the NYT’s unapologetic leftist bias11. She writes, “Though [Dean] Baquet [her successor and current executive editor] said publicly he didn’t want the Times to be the opposition party, his news pages were unmistakably anti-Trump. Some headlines contained raw opinion, as did some of the stories that were labeled as news analysis.”

Indeed, the Times and The Washington Post have become leftist tabloids, the latter as the ideological megaphone of its billionaire socialist owner, Jeff Bezos12, one of this era’s leading “Archenemies of Liberty13.” But the print media is moderate compared to CNN and the cable collective’s dezinformatsia campaign14 against Trump.

Media bias is nothing new, but in concert with the Democrat Party’s15 most vociferous gang of socialist deniers16 and the ability to reach virtually every American 24/7/365, that bias is a more formidable threat to Liberty than at any time in our history.

Remarkably, the Democrats’ primary tactic for mastering that threat was inadvertently outed by then-Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi a month after Trump took office — but received little attention at the time.

In a March 2017 interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, Pelosi outlined the “wrap up smear” tactic that has become the Demo’s political black bag go-to strategy to undermine the Trump administration. She did so framing the smear tactic as something Republicans used against Barack Obama17. According to Pelosi: “It’s called a wrap-up smear. You make up something. Then you have the press write about it. And then you say, ‘Everybody is writing about this charge.’ It’s a tool of an [authoritarian regime] to just have you always be talking about what you want them to be talking about.”

The problem with Pelosi’s explanation is that even those with the most rudimentary brainstem activity know that Republicans can’t “have the press write about” whatever they dictate, and then use that as bona fide to make their point. That tactic belongs exclusively to the Democrats, whom the media have long favored.

In June, during a House Minority Leader Weekly Briefing recorded by C-SPAN18, Pelosi went into more detail about the “wrap-up smear” strategy:

“It’s a diversionary tactic. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. You demonize, and then you — we call it the wrap-up smear. You want to talk about politics? It’s called the wrap-up smear. You smear somebody with falsehoods and all the rest, and then you merchandise it, and then you write it, and they’ll say, ‘See, it’s reported in the press that this, this, and this,’ so they have that validation that the press reported the smear, and then it’s called a wrap-up smear. ‘Now I’m going to merchandise the press’s report on the smear that we made.’ It’s a tactic.”