White House spells out Washington Post bias

FPI / September 9, 2019

In its reporting on the accomplishments of President Donald Trump from Memorial Day to Labor Day, The Washington Post characterized Trump’s performance as the “lost summer.”

Who really had the “lost summer”?

As temperatures were on the rise, an analysis said, the Post was employing a two-pronged bias playbook — criticism of the president without fact-checking or context, and ignoring or downplaying Trump’s many policy victories.

“The truth is, Trump racked up many well-documented victories that directly benefited the American people at home and abroad,” White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham and Hogan Gidley wrote in a Sept. 5 op-ed for the Washington Examiner.

“When the Post asked, the White House proudly provided it with a detailed list of the administration’s 26 most important successes of the summer. Of those 26 accomplishments, the Post chose to publish just four, which it buried under 11 paragraphs of editorialized critique.”

When it comes to “lost summers”, Grisham and Gidley wrote, the Post takes the crown as the Jeff Bezos-owned outlet “had some pretty embarrassing moments. Whether it was incorrectly stating that presidents do not deliver remarks on the Fourth of July, ignoring speeches by Presidents Reagan, Kennedy, and Obama, or being called out for shoddy, politically motivated fact-checking, the Post’s lost summer culminated with a fateful day in August when it was forced to issue 15 corrections to a single article.”

The Post, Grisham and Gidley noted, “could have written about the president’s directive to ease all federal student loan debt for disabled veterans. They didn’t. They could have written about the first time in history a sitting United States president walked across the DMZ into North Korea. Not a chance. They could have written about the first stage of the president’s historic trade deal with Japan, which will give our American farmers even more access to one of the largest and most promising markets. Of course not. The president even fixed dangerous immigration loopholes to increase border security and make American communities safer, but these two reporters would not deviate from their preset narrative and write about that either.”

In what was allegedly a “news” article about Trump’s summer accomplishments, “the Post not only chose to ignore, but refused to cite 84 percent of the president’s actual summer accomplishments,” Grisham and Gidley wrote. “Respectable, reputable, responsible news reporters would have listed those, gathered opinions from sources with diverse perspectives, and presented all of this information to their readers so they could develop their own opinions. Doing so would be a valuable, nonpartisan service to all Americans from across the political spectrum.”

Grisham and Gidley continued: “Sadly, the Washington Post wasn’t alone this summer. It is impossible to trust the media when the executive director of the New York Times is caught on tape outlining plans to transition its coverage from the Russian hoax to another false narrative about Trump and racism. Or when TV networks accused the president of ‘manufacturing a crisis’ at our southern border, only to later flip-flop and blame him for Congress’ refusal to fix that very crisis.”

The corporate media lambasted Trump for referring to Baltimore as “rat infested,” but “never apologized when a video surfaced of Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh making the exact same complaint,” Grisham and Gidley wrote. “When the president called out anti-Semitic comments, media posts, and associations by Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib, the press dismissed the Democrats’ bigotry as a mere invitation to dialogue about Jewish influence in the world.

“There was also a summer’s worth of major outlets openly questioning Trump’s sanity, but the hourly gaffes by Joe Biden are part of what ‘humanizes him.’ No wonder the national media’s popularity sits somewhere between smallpox and the plague.”

Free Press International