Reading Cameron Stewart’s running commentary in the Australian on the Trump impeachment hearings is a bizarro glimpse into the parallel universe of Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Stewart has been filing one giddy opinion piece after another, breathlessly claiming that the Democrats and their witnesses have been launching an endless fusillade of “bullets” that must surely finish off the Bad Orange Man forever. This is the end for Drumpf! he all but crows.
The only problem is that almost none of it is true. I don’t know if Stewart is actually watching the hearings or reading the transcripts, or not. The most generous assumption is that he is merely repeating the talking-points of his Trump-hatin’ legacy media echo chamber. The worse possibility is that he actually is paying attention, and his reports are a sad case of “This is Your Brain on Trump Derangement”.
Cameron Stewart, though, is merely a local excrescence of a phenomenon that is deranging the media everywhere.
Some journalists are simply lazy, and others share the Democrats’ goal of bringing down President Donald Trump by any means necessary.
That’s why the media reports of the hearings were so inaccurate.
Stewart, for instance, reported that the testimony of Alexander Vindman left “his reputation intact if not enhanced”. The reality is that Vindman was left looking like a vainglorious self-aggrandiser who overstepped the bounds of his authority. Stewart’s coverage of Gordon Sondland’s testimony was even worse. Stewart asserted that Sondland was the “star witness the Democrats were looking for”, with his “stunning testimony”.
When Ambassador Gordon Sondland led off with a statement — leaked everywhere — that there had been a “quid pro quo” for a White House meeting, the media ran with that story and ignored the rest of his testimony. They hardly bothered to report that he said later he had no direct knowledge of a “quid pro quo,” and that in fact President Trump told him explicitly: “I want nothing” and “no quid pro quo.” His testimony was, in fact, exculpatory. But the media treated it as if he had proved Democrats’ case.
This directly contradicts Stewart’s breathless assertions. In his defence, though, Stewart is only running with the legacy media pack.
Or take Dr. Fiona Hill. She came into her hearing last Thursday guns blazing, declaring that Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee were guilty of denying Russian interference in the 2016 election and backing a “fictitious narrative” about Ukrainian intervention.
The media reported that — and continued reporting that even after she had been forced to back away from her position.
The Republicans on the committee immediately confronted Hill with a fat, printed report on Russian and Ukrainian interference approved by Republican Congress members. Faced with such evidence directly contradicting her claim, Hill quickly backtracked.
Midway through the hearing, Dr. Hill was testifying about how it seemed the Ukrainians had “bet on the wrong horse” in 2016 and that Trump’s feelings about it were understandable. But the media ignored that story, even reporting the “fictitious narrative” headline after the hearing ended…
It was as if they hadn’t been watching at all.
And many weren’t…The media did not report what actually happened in the impeachment hearings, but what they want to have happened. They have enlisted themselves in a distortion of due process that threatens the constitutional rights of all Americans. If the president himself is not safe from abuse, none of us can be.
breitbart.com/the-media/2019/11/24/media-transcripts-hearings-impeachment/
As Clint Eastwood’s forthcoming film, Richard Jewell, is set to remind us: no one is. Jewell was a security guard at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics who discovered a pipe bomb planted at the Centennial Olympic Park. Jewell raised the alarm and helped evacuate people from the area, ultimately saving possibly hundreds of lives. Yet Jewell was subjected to a relentless trial-by-media falsely accusing him of being the bomber.
Closer to home, the Chamberlains were similarly tried and convicted by media for supposedly killing their infant daughter at Uluru in 1980. It was nearly a decade before the Chamberlains were exonerated.
No one is safe from the feral legacy media.