In a new piece in The Atlantic, author and national correspondent for Yahoo! News Alexander Nazaryan compared the thrill of covering the Trump administration to the thrill “storming Omaha Beach must have been for a 20-year old fresh from the plains of Kansas.”
In the piece, titled, “I Was an Enemy of the People,” Nazaryan recounts how he misses the action of covering Trump.
He accuses of Trump Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany of lying “relentlessly for months on end.”
Ominously, he reminds readers that frequently had to figure out whether or not Trump was on the verge of starting a “nuclear war.”
Overall, the intrepid journalists of America, in their brave coverage of Trump, were “merely going where he led. This was our Omaha Beach.”
The liberal media, in its Trump-era way of portraying itself as the victim, has taken that self-proclaimed victimhood to a new level.
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Trump Is History Repeating Itself
So covering Trump was a thrill.
Take a look at Nazaryan’s full accounting of his feelings on covering Trump:
Covering the administration was thrilling for many journalists, in the way that I imagine storming Omaha Beach must have been for a 20-year-old fresh from the plains of Kansas. He hadn’t signed up for battle, but there he was, liberating France. France, by the way, is where Trump called American soldiers who’d fallen in combat “suckers” and “losers.” When this magazine first reported those comments, Trump’s supporters denounced the Atlantic story as preposterous and offensive, even as outlet after outlet confirmed the reporting. They failed to realize that the preposterous and the offensive were the twin beacons of the Trump presidency.
Who is this story about? Trump, or the media?
I wonder how many Millennial journalists have asked their older colleagues about how “thrilling” it was for them to cover Ronald Reagan. People of an age remember how Reagan was treated by the media.
The media’s relationship with Republicans is nothing new – and might go as far back as 1968 when a book entitled, “News Twisters” by Edith Ephron, talked about liberal media bias.
The media would have you believe that this Trump-era was all a first for them, and that is why they all have some sort of weird post-Trump PTSD going on.
Oh no, the media has dated outside its group before, there have been other Republican presidents. They were merely the warm-up act for what would be done to Donald Trump.
Every Republican in recent memory, Bush 41, Bush 43, even presidential candidates, John McCain, Mitt Romney, and especially Sarah Palin, all dealt with media bias.
The difference was, the media wasn’t usually playing an active role. Look at some of the commentary from Democrats about these past figures:
In 2012, then Vice-Presidential candidate Joe Biden told a crowd that consisted of a large number of African-Americans that the Republican ticket led by Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney would, “put you all back in chains.”
In 2008, the late Congressman John Lewis accused Republican presidential candidate John McCain and running mate Sarah Palin of “playing with fire.” He went on to say that,”Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin are sowing the seeds of hatred and division, and there is no need for this hostility in our political discourse.”
Billionaire Democrat contributor George Soros said of George W. Bush that, “(he displays the) supremacist ideology of Nazi Germany.”
Actor and Activist Harry Belafonte also called Bush a racist, and NAACP Chairman Julian Bond once said that, “The Republican party would have the American flag and the swastika flying side by side.”
The things that Democrats once said of Republicans, are now things the allegedly objective media now say of Trump.
That is a fundamental difference between how past presidents were covered, and how Trump was covered, in my view.
To even insinuate that covering politics is in any way comparable to storming the beach at Normandy tells you how comfortable the media had become in their role as Trump’s adversary.
Indeed, Nazaryan says, “Without quite meaning to, Trump reminded journalists that their relationship to power should be adversarial.”
They needed to be reminded? After eight years of kid gloves with “no scandals” Obama?
The media set its sights on Donald Trump from the time he hit the escalator in Trump Tower in 2015, and then promptly moved on to those that worked for him, specifically former press secretary Kayleigh McEnany.
As a Journalism student, this writer is learning all the mechanics like the “inverted pyramid” process, but I am also learning about sources, checking and rechecking those sources, not making up “facts” of the story, or not making oneself the story.
I am learning that truth and integrity still matter.
The problem is, I’m not seeing that out of those who are already in the profession.
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Everything That Is Wrong With The Media
Message to the media: the problem is, there is simply not enough room here to tell you all the ways your hubris and arrogance is on full display and is doing none of you any favors.
Can we all agree as adults that no one in American history is comparable to the Nazis, for God’s sake?
Can we at least pretend the talking points don’t go out first thing in the morning?
The media says that, “by far the most difficult challenge was reporting that Trump had gotten something right.” Can they point out for us uneducated boobs in flyover country when exactly that was?
How much coverage was given to all the peace deals made in the Middle East?
Will Biden get any harsh scrutiny? Any scrutiny? Or will the media spend the next four years asking what his favorite flavor of milkshake is?
MSNBC’S Kasie Hunt gushed about how, “I’m just struck by the reality that we’ll now have a president who, as a rule, doesn’t lie, even when it might be easier.”
That kind of gives up the game, doesn’t it?
Alas, Mr. Nazaryan is absolutely right about one thing: journalists’ relationship to power should be adversarial.
But that only goes one way for the media.
From my perspective, the reason for all this is clear.
Trump finally fought back.
They hate Donald Trump because he exposed the fact that the media lies on a consistent basis, and has decided that they are the arbiters of what the American people can and cannot know.
Having the audacity to fight back is, in the final analysis, the ultimate crime.
The post Journalist: Covering Trump Was ‘Our Omaha Beach,’ Compares Experience To D-Day appeared first on The Political Insider.
(@iskandrah)