Michael Smerconish continues to absolve himself of any responsibility for his role in legitimizing Donald Trump as a real human contender for this nation's highest office. On Saturday's show, he bragged of taking calls only from pro-Trump folks. In the face of massive evidence indicating Russian collusion with the GOP, they still stand by their guy.
SMERCONISH: I did something I'd never done in 27 years of radio hosting, I cleared the call board and I requested only callers who agreed with the first two (pro-Trump
callers). And the results were eye-opening. I discovered a huge number of others also maintaining it was the proverbial nothing burger.
In other words, he wanted to hear the opinions of those who continue to willfully suppress the truth about Donald and his crime family, who maintain their steadfast support of this chaos-loving, misogynist-narcissist in the White House. He pretends to be surprised at their willingness to totally disregard the massive evidence against the Trump Administration even though throughout the campaign, he was one of the complicit media personalities who treated Trump like a normal, legitimate politician while demonizing Hillary Clinton, an actual serious, qualified candidate.
Matthew Rosenberg of "The New York Times" explained that there will always be those skeptical of facts, no matter what you do. He lends sanity into the discussion by explaining why it should be important, even to purposefully misinformed Trump supporters, to feel a sense of outrage by the revelations of a hostile foreign government intervening in our political process.
ROSENBERG: We don't have allowances to have foreign governments feed information, provide resources to political campaigns because we don't want foreigners playing a role in our elections. Same reason why you have to be a citizen to vote. You can't just wash up in the U.S. and say I'm going to vote today. You know, you have to have lived here, you have to be a citizen. And these e-mails really do establish, more than anything else, a direct line to the Trump family, to their inner circle between them and the Russian government saying, 'look, we want to help you.' How far did it go?
Salena Zito writes for the "Washington Examiner" and the "New York Post" and takes up for Trump supporters, because both sides. It can't just be one side that's culpable, right? Trump's base has good reason to be wary of the media, look how their leader speaks of our Fourth Estate.
ZITO: Well, I think the thing that we need to maybe think about and explore deeper going forward is, is this distrust that the American people have with big institutions, but also with media, This is something that has been ongoing. The last time we had a broad trust with the media was 1964.
Let's just stop there. The distrust in the media can be attributed to the constant repetition of carefully crafted propaganda, along with the absolution of the Fairness Doctrine and a few other bad decisions. Casting doubt on legitimate news is actually a KGB-inspired technique that labels any news items that the head of state dislikes as fake news.
Disinformation campaigns took the form of stories that focused on Hillary Clinton's 'criminal conduct' and her private email server and Benghazi, while ignoring Donald Trump, the p*ssy grabber and mocker of the disabled. The end result was pro-Trump stories outnumbered pro-Clinton stories at a ratio of 30:7, in favor of Trump.
It seems this is still unbeknownst to Ms. Zito, as she has helped facilitate this exact distrust of the media. She and Smerconish have helped pump these ignorant voters full of lies. No matter what they claim, they were and still are a very big part of the problem.
We will never forget who was complicit in creating this climate that allowed this woefully unfit man to take over our government and ruin our precious institutions of Democracy in less than one year. Maybe if the media demanded that Trump answer ONE substantive policy-oriented question before the election, might some of those die-hard supporters have learned of their candidate's woeful incompetence? Or would they have called it a 'gotcha' question?
The doubt created by the media, thanks to its own irresponsible behavior, has destroyed the trust in our Fourth Estate. As a result, Americans are dangerously skeptical of the truth while falling for deception far too easily.
Our fearless colleagues at the Professional Left Podcast break it down bluntly and succinctly.
