by Frank Holmes, reporter
Trump-hating reporters have told so many lies about President Donald Trump that an award-winning journalist has collected the 132 worst examples.
Sharyl Attkisson, who has won five Emmy Awards and an Edward R. Murrow Award for investigative reporting, said the media in the Trump era has printed an “unprecedented string of fact-challenged reporting.”
Reporters for prestigious and respected news outlets are churning out “errors in numbers that were unheard of just a couple of years ago,” she said.
Her “definitive list” includes every form of fake news trick available to a reporter.
News anchors, writers, and radio commentators have tried to make Trump look bad by “declaring that Trump’s claims are ‘lies’ when they are matters of opinion,” “taking Trump’s statements and events out of context,” reporting unverified accounts about Trump as fact, “relying on untruthful, conflicted sources; and presenting reporter opinions in news stories, without labeling them as opinions.”
Each item on the incomplete list is a separate story. She doesn’t double-count when news outlets parrot the same fake news story reported elsewhere, or repeat their lies over and over again.
The list makes clear how completely the media have tried to smear Donald Trump, beginning before he even took office — The first story is dated August 2016.
The media tied to humiliate the president by making him look uninformed, especially about his signature issues.
Take, for example, this attempt to paint Trump as a trade ignoramus. During a 2017 trade meeting with Japanese executives, he asked them to “try building your cars in the United States instead of shipping them over.” Daniel Shane CNN Money immediately began spinning. The first two lines of his story stated: “Trump asks Japan to build cars in the US. Japan already builds cars in the US.”
But in that same speech, President Trump thanked Japanese companies for “creating jobs” for our country—twice. Even The Washington Post had to tell its readers, “Stop cherry-picking that Trump quote about Japanese cars. It’s not what you think.” Shane sheepishly updated his blog and added Trump’s praise of Japanese automakers to the end of his story—but never corrected his truth-twisting introduction.
The media also tried to make Donald Trump look paranoid like a throwback to Richard Nixon. “Donald Trump just flat-out lied about Trump Tower wiretapping,” wrote CNN political reporter Chris Cilizza.
In March 2017, Trump tweeted “Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory.” Cilizza said, “What Trump is trying to do with the White House is … establish an alternative set of facts … and then, by repeating them enough, convince people that his facts are just as good as the actual facts.”
But “there were numerous wiretaps involving Trump Tower, including a meeting of Trump officials with a foreign dignitary,” Atkisson wrote. “At least two Trump associates who had offices in or frequented Trump Tower were also reportedly wiretapped.”
The liberal media also shaded the truth to make Trump seem like a hypocrite. NBC News claimed Trump “wiretapped” Michael Cohen, the former lawyer reporters call Trump’s “fixer.” But it later had to admit there was no wiretap.
Another alleged case of “hypocrisy” the way they questioned First Lady Melania Trump’s immigration status. USA Today claimed that Melania Trump “was an undocumented working model” when she went on a U.S. photoshoot in 1995. Although she strongly denied the story, NBC News said the phony story “points to Trump’s hypocrisy” on illegal immigration. If his wife broke immigration law, how could Trump turn a cold shoulder to other “undocumented workers”?
But “the media got the date wrong,” Atkisson noted. The photos were actually taken in 1997, a year after she began legally working in the U.S.
And, of course, they tried to make Trump look like a racist—beginning literally the day he took office. On January 20, 2017, Time magazine claimed Trump ordered that a bust of Martin Luther King Jr. be removed from the Oval Office. The reporter later admitted it was still there.
His original source for the story? He was looking at a picture of the Oval Office where someone was standing in front of it, didn’t see the bust, and reported it was removed.
Then, there’s the granddaddy of all media lies: Russian collusion. “The release of the Mueller report in April 2019 belies countless news stories over more than two years,” Atkisson wrote. “The report does not find collusion between Trump and Russia President Putin and also concludes there’s no evidence any American conspired or coordinated with any Russian.”
“The many who claimed there was hard evidence of collusion in hand proved to be wrong, yet there is no record of media apologies and corrections on these points,” she added.
You can read the complete listing in her article, “Media Mistakes in the Trump Era: The Definitive List.” But even at 132 lies, the list is not complete.
In November 2017, Newsweek ran a story promising “Scientific Proof That Trump’s Hands are Too Small to Hold a Water Bottle Like a Normal Adult.” This “news” was an attempt to dredge up a dirty crack Sen. Marco Rubio made on the campaign trail trying to insult the size of Trump’s genitalia.
But the article didn’t contain a shred of scientific proof. The crack journalist just told readers to “Google ‘Trump drinking water two hands video’ and you can see that this is definitely a thing.”
Bear in mind that the list is incomplete; that news outlets often repeat a story after other outlets publish it in a game of media “telephone”; and the list is growing longer every day.
This atrocious record may explain why more than 90% of the mainstream media’s coverage of Donald Trump has been negative.
And just think: They may have another four and a half years to go.
Frank Holmes is a veteran journalist and an outspoken conservative that talks about the news that was in his weekly article, “On The Holmes Front.”