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On the 250th anniversary of President Jackson’s birth, Trump honored the seventh president as a personal hero when he laid a wreath at his tomb in Nashville. Jackson “rejected authority that looked down on the common people,” Trump said in his remarks.
Like Trump, Jackson faced a hostile press. But when it comes to Trump, it would be difficult to overemphasize just how biased and often dishonest the press has become. During the campaign, the New York Times ran a page-one story above the fold that depicted what it claimed was “a debasing face-to-face encounter between Mr. Trump and a young woman he hardly knew.”
“Donald J. Trump had barely met Rowanne Brewer Lane when he asked her to change out of her clothes,” the startling lede said of the 1990 encounter. The story quoted Brewer Lane as saying, “Donald was having a pool party at Mar-a-Lago. There were about fifty models and thirty men. There were girls in the pools, splashing around. For some reason Donald seemed a little smitten with me. He just started talking to me and nobody else.”
Then, Brewer Lane said, “He suddenly took me by the hand, and he started to show me around the mansion. He asked me if I had a swimsuit with me. I said no. I hadn’t intended to swim. He took me into a room and opened drawers and asked me to put on a swimsuit.”
Brewer Lane, at the time a twenty-six-year-old model, did as Mr. Trump asked, the story said. “I went into the bathroom and tried one on,” she recalled. “I came out, and he said, ‘Wow.’ ”
All of that was true, except for one problem: The paper framed her quotes to make it appear that her positive experience with Trump was a profoundly negative one.
Two days after the story appeared, an infuriated Brewer Lane was on Fox & Friends to totally refute the story’s implications. She told cohost Ainsley Earhardt that her agent had invited her to a pool party at Mar-a-Lago at the last minute. She did not have time after a photo shoot to go home before the party and grab a bathing suit. She said she got along with Trump nicely as they chatted around the pool.
“We started walking around the mansion,” she said on Fox. “He started showing me the architecture. We were having a very nice conversation, and we got into a certain part of it, and he asked me if I had a swimsuit. I said I didn’t.”
Trump asked if she wanted one, and he gave her a bikini. As she changed in the mansion, he returned to the pool party. When she returned to the party, Trump said, “Now that’s a stunning Trump girl right there.”
“I was actually flattered,” she said on Fox. “I didn’t feel like it was a demeaning situation or comment at all,” adding that was what she told the New York Times.
Indeed, contrary to the paper’s claim that the encounter was “debasing,” the story buried in the sixteenth paragraph the fact that after meeting Trump, the model began dating him.
On the TV show, Brewer Lane said the paper took her quotes and spun the May 14, 2016, story to create a negative connotation, when in fact she had told the paper that she enjoyed the encounter and Trump’s “boyish charm.” She said their relationship continued for several months.
“I did not have a negative experience with Donald Trump, and I don’t appreciate them making it look like that I was saying that it was a negative experience because it was not,” Brewer Lane said flatly.
In fact, contrary to the story’s claim, Trump “never made me feel like I was being demeaned in any way,” she said on TV. “He was very gracious. I saw him around all types of people, all types of women. He was very kind, thoughtful, generous, you know. He was a gentleman,” Brewer Lane said.
Asked whether Trump ever mistreated women, Brewer Lane said, “Not that I’ve ever seen. Absolutely without a doubt, no.” Moreover, she said, “I think Donald is doing a great job, and he is a very successful businessman. He’s a great leader because of that.” In fact, she said, “…I’m supporting him.”
Decades ago, the two New York Times reporters who wrote the story would have been fired for writing a clearly dishonest article. But in today’s media world, scam artists posing as journalists are not fired and even appear on TV without a sign of embarrassment to defend their bogus work.
Rather than try to refute Brewer Lane’s denunciation of their article, Michael Barbaro and Megan Twohey, the New York Times reporters who wrote the story, spoke vaguely on CBS This Morning about their impressions and intent.
“I recall in my interview with her that she expressed some—she basically said ‘I was taken aback by this,’ and I think that’s how we depicted it,” Barbaro said. Twohey spoke of their desire to present “a variety of voices” in the piece. Nor did the paper retract the story after its subject appeared on TV to say its portrayal was false and completely the opposite of what happened.
“Ms. Brewer Lane was quoted fairly, accurately, and at length,” a spokesperson for the paper said. “The story provides a lot of context for the reader, including that the swimsuit scene was the ‘start of a whirlwind romance’ between Ms. Brewer Lane and Mr. Trump.”
What the statement failed to mention was that a reader would have to wade through 725 words of the story, headlined “Crossing the Line: How Donald Trump Behaved with Women in Private,” before learning that rather than being offended by her encounter with Trump and demeaned by him, she began dating him. If that fact had been included in the lede, exposing the story as a fraud, it could not have been run.
Before the election, the media said Trump was a business failure and broke. After the election, the media said he was so successful and wealthy that his tentacles stretched all over the world, and almost anything he touched constituted a conflict of interest that would benefit him financially. In fact, unless a president keeps his assets in cash under a mattress, any decision he makes may affect his wealth. That is why Congress exempted the president from the federal conflict-of-interest statute. Rather than benefitting financially from his presidential run, Trump took off from his business to campaign for two and a half years and now donates his salary of $400,000 a year to worthy government programs like the fight against opioid addiction.
To further denigrate Trump, the media often claimed that his wealth was inherited. In fact, while his father early on would guarantee his son’s construction loans, when Fred Trump died in 1999, Trump was already worth $1.6 billion, according to Forbes.
Stories on objections to Trump’s plan to build a wall attacked the idea as racist but rarely mentioned that when they were in Congress, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Chuck Schumer all voted to authorize construction of fencing and other barriers along the southern border.
On the Senate floor in October 2006, Obama said of the legislation, “The bill before us will certainly do some good.” He praised the bill, saying it would provide “better fences and better security along our borders” and would “help stem some of the tide of illegal immigration in this country.”
Nor do the stories mention Bill Clinton’s comments in his 1995 State of the Union address when he spoke forcefully about the problem of illegal immigration and referred to “illegal aliens,” not “undocumented” immigrants.
“All Americans, not only in the states most heavily affected but in every place in this country, are rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country,” Clinton said. “The jobs they hold might otherwise be held by citizens or legal immigrants. The public service they use impose burdens on our taxpayers.” Moreover, Clinton said, “We are a nation of immigrants. But we are also a nation of laws. It is wrong and ultimately self-defeating for a nation of immigrants to permit the kind of abuse of our immigration laws we have seen in recent years, and we must do more to stop it.”
When Trump says almost the exact same thing about illegal immigration, journalists and Democrats slam him as a contemptible racist. The same double standard applied to Trump’s announcement that the United States considers Jerusalem the capital of Israel and that the U.S. Embassy in Israel would be relocated from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama all said the same thing and never followed through, but stories condemning Trump’s decision as dangerous and foolish almost never mentioned the previous presidents’ promise.
Stories condemning Trump’s claim that enhanced interrogation, including waterboarding, works never mentioned that in December 2014, President Obama’s CIA director John Brennan said, “Our review indicates that interrogations of detainees on whom EITs [enhanced interrogation techniques] were used did produce intelligence that helped thwart attack plans, capture terrorists, and save lives.”
Stories on Trump’s approval of the Keystone XL Pipeline cited objections from environmentalists but rarely mentioned that if approval was not given due to concerns that the crude oil would contribute to global warming, TransCanada would divert the oil from Alberta to China. There, refineries pose far greater risks to the environment. The stories never mentioned that the United States already has 185,000 miles of liquid petroleum pipelines, which are far safer than transporting it by truck or train. Nor did the stories mention that the protesters who purportedly wanted to preserve the environment destroyed fifty acres of grassland and left so much garbage that it took 250 garbage trucks to clean it up.
Media stories reamed Trump for revealing too much to Russian diplomats in an Oval Office meeting about the roll-up of ISIS’s efforts to plant bombs in laptops to blow up airliners. In fact, because Russia and the United States cooperate with each other on counterterrorism matters, exchanging such information between the two countries is routine. But because the arrangements are kept confidential, the White House press office could not rebut the reports that Trump had grievously harmed national security.
Trump did not tell the Russians where the plot had been hatched, and initial reports did not say. But then, in an effort to expose how wrong Trump had been to mention the intelligence coup to the Russians, ABC News and NBC News revealed far more details to the entire world, including that the plot had been uncovered in Israel by an Israeli spy.
The media widely claimed that Trump’s ban on travelers from seven countries was a Muslim ban, when in fact it was aimed at countries that do not have a reliable structure for allowing the United States to vet immigrants. Even within the United States, it is difficult for the FBI with a full background investigation to determine if an individual could pose a threat. With no reliable records or sources in a country like Libya, Somalia, Syria, or Yemen, it is impossible. Nor did the stories usually mention that the vast majority of the world’s Muslims living in other countries were not included in Trump’s ban.
“Newly released records show the trust agreement that Donald Trump used to put his adult sons in charge of his company allows him to draw money from it upon his request, illustrating the thin divide between the president and his private fortune,” the Washington Post breathlessly reported, as if there were something nefarious about Trump dipping into his own funds.
The media reported Trump’s controversial pardon of former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, but both the New York Times and the Washington Post ignored Trump’s comments at a news conference pointing out that Obama had pardoned Chelsea Manning, who was convicted of violations of the Espionage Act after disclosing to WikiLeaks nearly 750,000 classified or sensitive military and diplomatic documents. Nor did they pick up on Trump’s reference to Obama’s pardon of Oscar López Rivera. Rivera admitted engaging in seditious conspiracy, use of force to commit robbery, interstate transportation of firearms, and conspiracy to transport explosives with intent to destroy government property when he was one of the leaders of the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional Puertorriqueña (FALN). FALN was a clandestine paramilitary organization devoted to Puerto Rican independence that carried out more than 120 bomb attacks on United States targets between 1974 and 1983, killing six.
Instead of reporting what Trump actually said, the Washington Post kissed off Trump’s defense of his pardon by saying, “At the news conference, when asked about Arpaio, he began reading from a sheet of paper, rattling off other controversial pardons under former presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.”
“Top Trump Organization Executive Asked Putin Aide for Help on Business Deal,” a Washington Post headline said. Not until the eleventh paragraph did the story say that the executive, Michael Cohen of the Trump Organization, said that the Russian project was abandoned for business reasons when Russian government permission was not secured and that the failed initiative had nothing to do with Trump’s presidential campaign.
A Washington Post story declared Trump “the least popular president in modern times” based on a new poll. Buried in the second to last paragraph was the fact that the poll found that if the election were held again, Trump would still beat Hillary, not only in electoral votes but in popular votes.
The press reported any fleeting encounter by a low-level Trump campaign aide with a Russian as a huge story. But the stories never mentioned Brit Hume’s statement on Fox News that he once saw Senator Dianne Feinstein, the Democrat from California who is a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, having lunch in the Senate Dining Room with Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the United States.
Nor is Fox News immune to broadcasting misleading information. In an effort to support Trump’s claim that he had been wiretapped in Trump Tower, Fox News judicial analyst Andrew Napolitano made the absurd claim that Obama had gone outside of normal channels and appealed to GCHQ, the British version of the National Security Agency, to intercept Trump’s communications. That would have been a felony.
Fox ran interviews with experts like former attorney general Michael Mukasey and former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy saying that FBI counterintelligence cases, such as the one probing Russian interference in the 2016 election, do not result in criminal charges. Tell that to John A. Walker Jr., a Navy warrant officer; Jonathan J. Pollard, a spy for Israel; Ronald Pelton, a former NSA employee; former FBI agent Robert Hanssen; and Aldrich Ames, a CIA officer, all of whom went to jail on espionage charges as a result of FBI counterintelligence investigations.
The media castigated Trump for threatening North Korea with “fire and fury.” Few stories mentioned that back in 1993, then-president Bill Clinton made a similar threat against Kim Il-sung, the grandfather of the current leader. During a trip through Asia, Clinton said about his policy toward North Korea, “We would overwhelmingly retaliate if they were to ever use, to develop and use nuclear weapons. It would mean the end of their country as they know it.”
While some of Trump’s comments may be misconstrued as racist, in fact they are usually a statement of fact: In announcing his presidential bid on June 16, 2015, at Trump Tower, Trump said, “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best…. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” Clearly, anyone who violates U.S. law by illegally crossing the border is more likely to engage in criminal activity than other immigrants.
The stories claiming that Trump is a racist rarely mention that for two years before meeting Melania Knauss, he dated African American model Kara Young. Nor do they quote Lynne Patton, an African American who, until she took a job in the Trump administration, was one of the Trump Organization’s most trusted employees as a vice president of the Eric Trump Foundation and senior assistant to the Trump family. Sitting at Trump Grill, an upscale restaurant in the lower lobby of Trump Tower, a few months before the election, Patton told me that she is treated as a member of the family and that Trump is the furthest thing from being a racist or a misogynist.
When she released a video supporting Trump, she was prepared for the backlash she says she received.
“I read on a daily basis the vitriol that family members receive,” Patton told me. “Every time they go on TV, it’s everything from their looks, to what they were wearing, to what they said, to the color of their tie, to the way their hair is styled.”
When the Trump administration named Patton to head the Department of Housing and Urban Affairs’ New York and New Jersey office, the New York Times headlined the story: “Trump Family Wedding Planner to Head New York’s Federal Housing Office”—because as one of her duties, she had once helped with Eric Trump’s wedding planning.
Nor do stories claiming that Trump is a misogynist quote Barbara Res. Trump hired Res in September 1980 to be in charge of building the sixty-eight-story Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue. Forget about female executives in the construction business then; they did not exist. But Trump put his faith in her and told her he wanted her to “treat everything as if it were my project and my money, and I would be his final word,” Res told me.
Today, Trump and Melania send Barron to St. Andrew’s Episcopal School in Potomac, Maryland, where 42 percent of children enrolled are students of color. Although this fact is listed on the school’s website under the “About” tab, no major media outlet has cited it.
From minor to major stories, by my estimate, roughly half of the exclusives reported by the media about Trump have turned out to be wrong. White House staffers did not meet in the dark because they could not figure out how to turn on the lights in the Cabinet Room. Trump does not watch TV in the residence in a bathrobe. Trump did not call then-National Security Adviser Mike Flynn at 3 a.m. to ask him whether a strong or weak dollar is good for the economy. Trump did not hire security forces who were in conflict with the Secret Service at his rallies: They worked smoothly together.
Far more serious, FBI director James Comey did not ask for more funds for the FBI’s investigation of Russian involvement in the election, allegedly leading to his being fired by Trump. The FBI never requests special funding for any investigation.
In a talk at a reunion of Washington Post employees held by former Post chairman Don Graham at the Hyatt Centric in Arlington, Virginia, Post reporter David A. Fahrenthold, who broke the story of the Access Hollywood tape, strongly implied that he got the audiotape from NBC executives, saying that in that case there was no need to check its authenticity.
“We knew it was valid,” he told the more than three hundred former employees on September 28, 2017.
Yet NBC executives killed a story by Ronan Farrow that exposed Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein’s sexual attacks on women and the hypocrisy of the Hollywood elite. They have created an industry of sanctimoniously denouncing Trump at every turn as morally reprehensible but were aware of Weinstein’s predatory behavior and did nothing about it.
When it comes to media hypocrisy, there was no better example than when the Associated Press revealed in 2012 that the CIA had developed an asset who was reporting on an al-Qaeda plot in Yemen to blow up airliners bound for the United States. AP’s decision to run the story meant the end of the CIA’s asset, potentially putting at risk the lives of hundreds of future airline passengers.
The story had no legitimate reason for running: No abuse or failure was involved. The CIA was doing its job to save American lives. Yet the press pounced on the Obama Justice Department when it tried to determine the source of the leak by obtaining AP phone records. It is difficult enough for the FBI to pinpoint the source of a leak for possible criminal prosecution. Yet as a result of the pressure from the media, Attorney General Eric Holder changed Justice Department policy to make it harder for the Justice Department to obtain media phone records in the future.
In September, October, and November 2017, broadcast evening news coverage of Trump was 91 percent negative, according to the Media Research Center. Stories on the remarkable unemployment numbers of the Trump administration and the fact that Trump’s aggressive tactics against ISIS were paying off—with terrorists giving up because they had no food and were not being paid—were buried or were nonexistent.
“I think the media have been harder on Trump than any other president certainly that I’ve known about,” former president Jimmy Carter told Maureen Dowd of the New York Times. “I think they feel free to claim that Trump is mentally deranged and everything else without hesitation.”
In contrast, even though it was based on Air Force records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, no one in the media picked up the fact that as vice president, Democrat Joe Biden had spent a million dollars of taxpayer funds flying back and forth to his Wilmington home often several times a week, sometimes making round trips from Wilmington just to play golf with Obama, as reported in my book The First Family Detail: Secret Service Agents Reveal the Hidden Lives of the Presidents. But the media had a field day running stories about Trump Cabinet officers flying on government or chartered planes for legitimate government business.
During Watergate, I sat next to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein at the Washington Post and later joined Woodward’s investigative team at his invitation. I know the pressure we were all under from executive editor Ben Bradlee to be fair and accurate. Today, journalists in the mainstream media—where a Pew Research Center poll found liberals outnumber conservatives five to one—simply cannot bring themselves to write a positive story about Trump or to give decent play to his successes.
Honest journalism is not completely dead. The New York Times’s exposé of Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein’s predatory behavior toward women and the Washington Post’s exposé of Senate candidate Roy Moore’s similar sexual conduct with teenage girls when he was a deputy district attorney represented journalism at its best. Contrary to Moore’s defense, the women who accused him of preying upon them as teenagers did not suddenly decide to come forward just before the Alabama special election. Rather, Post reporters developing stories on his candidacy heard rumors about his sordid activities with teenage girls when Moore was in his thirties. They tracked down the women and persuaded reluctant victims of Moore’s predatory behavior to tell their stories.
But when it comes to political reporting, the liberal media bias is pervasive and “all runs counter to President [Donald] Trump,” says former National Public Radio CEO Ken Stern. “When you are liberal, and everyone else around you is as well, it is easy to fall into groupthink on what stories are important, what sources are legitimate, and what the narrative of the day will be.”