The media leaned back to paint President Trump’s Mount Rushmore speech as dark and divisive on Friday night, but some feel that “the resistance media” would not have been happy with anything the President.
“The coverage of President Trump’s Mount Rushmore speech was contrary to reality. It is as if the media narratives were worded long before the speech, and then immediately unfolded without regard to the actual speech,” said the professor at William Cornell Law School and media critic William A. Jacobson told Fox News.
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The polarizing speech was praised by conservatives and Trump supporters alike, while members of the liberal media used similar rhetoric in condemning the president’s comments.
The New York Times called the speech “dark and divisive,” reporting that it launched “Trump’s effort to win a second term as a battle against a ‘new far-left fascism’ that seeks to eliminate the nation’s values and history. “
The New York Times was scolded by conservatives, but many other liberal publications echoed the Gray Lady.
“Is there anything more foolish than The New York Times in these Trump years that calls someone’s tone ‘dark and divisive’? They are too partisan to be ashamed of, ”wrote Clay Waters, a contributor to the Media Research Center.
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The Washington Post reported that Trump “delivered a dark speech before Independence Day in which he tried to exploit the racial and social divisions of the nation.” A quick search for the term “dark and divisive” on Twitter shows that liberal experts ranging from CNN’s Brian Stelter to NBC News’s Claire McCaskill used the same adjectives to describe Trump’s speech.
“It is a crazy moment, in fact, when the mainstream media can portray a speech designed to celebrate the United States as dark and divisive.”
“It is a crazy moment, in fact, when the mainstream media can portray a speech designed to celebrate the United States as dark and divisive,” DePauw University professor and media critic Jeffrey McCall told Fox News.
“Sure, Trump criticized anarchists and people who are determined to destroy monuments, but that rhetoric would hardly have been considered polarizing in years past.” For the resistance media, nothing that Trump said in his speech at Mount Rushmore would have been appropriate, ”McCall said.
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McCall feels that “the mainstream media narrative today is largely negative about the United States” and coverage of Trump’s speech reinforces his theory.
“Those news organizations were not willing to give that narrative even over the weekend to celebrate the founding of the United States,” he said.
CNN began its negative coverage of Trump’s speech before he took the stage, when a reporter on Friday described Mount Rushmore as “a monument to two slave owners” located on stolen land before the president’s comments.
After the speech ended, CNN’s Chris Cillizza released a list of the “28 most scandalous moments” of the speech.
“I am here as its president to proclaim, before the country and before the world, this monument will never be desecrated,” was one of Trump’s comments that the CNN political analyst considered “scandalous.”
The CNN expert also criticized Trump for telling the South Dakota audience: “I love your state. I love this country.”
On MSNBC, coverage of Trump’s speech was so negative that NewsBusters managing editor Curtis Houck put together a summary titled: “Here are the worst moments of Mt. America-Hating, MSNBC Anti-Founders. Rushmore coverage. “
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“MSNBC was degraded on Friday night with a vile show of hatred for the United States, the Constitution (except press freedom), the Declaration of Independence, the Founding Fathers and positive celebrations of where the country has been and where we hope to leave “Houck wrote.
Houck included quotes from MSNBC presenter Al Sharpton, MSNBC political analyst and PBS correspondent Yamiche Alcindor, MSNBC presenters Ari Melber, Joshua Johnson, New York Times correspondent and columnist Michelle Goldberg, among others.
Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro viewed the media coverage as “extraordinary illumination,” tweeting that the address “was sparked by weeks of riots, looting, demolition of monuments, and lies about Americans both dead and alive.”
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“The few members of the national media who had not yet shown their bias came out on July 4 to get involved in the 2020 campaign. There did not appear to be a single unbiased story about Trump’s visit to Mount Rushmore.” Washington Times columnist Tim Young told Fox News.
“The most ridiculous part was when the leftist media called Trump divisive for standing up to protesters and those destroying American cities,” Young added. “For the left-wing media, he is the divisive one, not the person who causes violence and demolishes statues.”
