I never realized I could get such warm fuzzies from quality journalism.
In case you haven’t heard, Trump’s press secretary Sean Spicer — in his first press conference as speaker for the President — told a few petty and easily debunked lies about crowd size, among other things. Showing a bizarre obsession with the minutiae of this subject, he also took time to attack the media for “deliberately false reporting” (i.e., debunking his boss’s wild assertions). He launched a particular attack on a single detail of a single report by a single reporter, which was found to be false (and which the reporter had corrected already, within minutes of publication, along with an apology).
Of course, he took no questions.
It now fell to Kellyanne Conway to defend the indefensible — a job at which she has a great deal of experience. The video above is Chuck Todd from Meet the Press grilling her on these absurd, childish, unnecessary, easily debunkable, Orwellian lies. Why did the President feel the need to do this?
Over and over, he told her: “You did not answer the question.” “You did not answer the question.” “You did not answer the question.”
When, at one point, she referred to Spicer’s lies as “alternative facts,” he helpfully clarified:
Wait a minute. Alternative facts? Alternative facts? Four of the five facts he uttered . . . were just not true. Alternative facts are not facts; they’re falsehoods.
I honestly have a hard time understanding this phenomenon.
It doesn’t matter how much you like Trump, or dislike the media, or anyone else. This is just basic, verifiable information. You don’t have to hate Trump for it, or say he’s a bad person. We’re just talking, at a very elementary level, about whether information is accurate or not.
You either care about the truth, or you don’t.
Many people don’t. But it’s incredibly gratifying that so many people, of so many political persuasions, still do.
Brian D. Buckley 