The dam may finally be breaking when it comes to Trump with more whistleblowers potentially coming forward, and with some small cracks appearing over at his propaganda network, a.k.a. Fox "News," but as CNN's Reliable Sources host Brian Stelter and his guests, CNN reporter Oliver Darcy and former Fox host Juliet Huddy discussed this Sunday, if Trump survives impeachment, he's going to have Fox and his other allies in the right-wing media and fever swamps of the Internet "poisoning the public dialogue" to thank for it.
DARCY: Sure. If you watch outlets like Fox, it's not enough really to say Brian that they're being dishonest. It is an inverse image of reality. And what I mean by that is, if you watch Fox, it's not president Trump who has potentially abused the powers of his office, it is Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden.
If you watch Fox, it's not Trump who is lying to the American people on a regular basis He's the truth teller. If you watch Fox, it's not the right-wing fever swamps who are spreading conspiracy theories, it's the mainstream media.
Total inverse image of reality. And if Trump does happen to survive this deepening scandal, I think he can only credit this right-wing media machine for poisoning the public dialogue and distorting truth for millions of people to the point where people can't tell what is happening, what is the truth and what is fiction.
STELTER: So they just throw up their hands?
DARCY: Right.
[...]
STELTER: And Julia, you worked at Fox for many years, 18 years at Fox News and local stations, what do you see happening today? How does this look to you?
HUDDY: Well I think that you have to look at, Tucker Carlson is a great example. I mean, he's getting out there and he's putting something slightly negative, but by the same token, he immediately follows with, but... you know this impeachment thing, so I think that they're just trying to play both sides, talking out of both sides of their mouths.
And that's one of the things that Fox is very effective at doing. It's kind of... it's not so much that it's particularly clever, or that there's so much particularly diabolical, even though some people think that they are.
It's that they're doing something that we did when we were little kids, which is lying by omission... that some of us did as little kids.
STELTER: Lying by omission.
HUDDY: Lying by omission. They leave out the the context, they leave out facts, they spin it so that it gives just enough information, but not all of the information, but the information that it did give out, it pushes their narrative.
Now if someone could just have a chat with the producers at CNN that insist on muddying the waters by putting lying Trump-boosting pundits like Rick Santorum, David Urban and a list too long to name here, along with Republican politicians and administration officials who are allowed to come on the air and lie with impunity.
Stelter does a pretty decent job most of the time, but CNN needs to clean up its own house as well when it comes to keeping the public informed about what the truth is. The both-s0iderism we see at CNN, MSNBC and a lot of the local networks is every bit as toxic as what goes on at Fox day in and day out.
