The guy whose opinions nobody asked for is back. This weekend, Donald Trump Jr. took to Twitter to rant and rave about the quality of the commercials that aired during the Super Bowl this year, zeroing in on one particular target — an effort highlighting the societal contributions of the media that essentially served as a counter to President Donald Trump’s relentless effort to discredit most of the mainstream media as “fake news.”
Trump Jr. whined:
‘By far the worst Super Bowl commercials ever… You know how MSM journalists could avoid having to spend millions on a Super Bowl comercial [sic] to gain some undeserved credibility? How about report the news and not their leftist BS for a change.’
As he indicates, The Washington Post spearheaded Super Bowl-associated efforts to highlight journalists’ work that culminated in a commercial featuring narration from Tom Hanks. He touched on a number of high profile societal developments where journalists continue to contribute to an understanding of the facts.
To be clear, the media aren’t just complaining that some people don’t take them as credible. Their intended audiences don’t automatically include every angry Trump supporter the Trump campaign might be able to drag out of the woodwork who’d dismiss the news as a conspiracy.
No — President Trump has decried the vast majority of the most familiar media outlets as the enemy of the people multiple times, leaving journalists in a position to fight for their very legitimacy. Trump Jr. acted as though they’ve simply sought to engage journalists in a conversation about standards, but in reality — as his declaration of most of the news as “leftist BS” indicates — the Trump team has dismissed journalism and news as a concept at this point.
The Post‘s commercial clearly indicated that involved media interests were responding to that sort of attack on the bedrock. It defended those who have given their very lives to the cause of spreading the truth, like The Post‘s own Jamal Khashoggi — whose murder by a foreign regime he opposed you’d hope the president of the United States would take seriously! Trump has done no such thing, shunning the idea of sanctions and even hesitating to explicitly acknowledge Saudi Arabia’s guilt.
It’s not as though the Trump team has some verifiable batch of non-“leftist BS” that the media hasn’t covered. As an easy example, just in recent days, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders asserted in response to criticism of Trump’s lackadaisical schedule that he’s “the most productive President in modern history,” adding:
‘It’s indisputable that our country has never been stronger than it is today under the leadership of President Trump.’
Are you kidding?
That’s the sort of “news” that the Trump team is so enraged members of the mainstream media besides figures like Lou Dobbs and Fox & Friends won’t cover.
Trump has suggested that the mainstream media was suppressing stories in order to hide his success and prowess — but that’s just nonsense. He offered the newly larger Republican majority in the U.S. Senate as an example of a shunned story — but only in an alternate universe was there any lack of coverage of the midterm elections. He just made up otherwise.
Featured Image via YouTube screenshot
