On Monday’s episode of “The Andrew Klavan Show,” Klavan talks about how the mainstream media isn’t creating real news, and they also don’t like it when people who disagree with them create news. Video and partial transcript below:
Once upon a time — a long time ago. Now, you know, 10 years ago say, John Nolte from Breitbart was over at my house. We’re having dinner. Nolte said, “You know what we should do. We should form a group of people, who every time Leftist journalists attack us personally, we go after the journalists themselves and attack them.” And I said that would be a terrible thing to do. You know, I don’t want to. I don’t want to stoop to that level. Well, then came Media Matters.
So Media Matters comes after us, and they say they listen to me and Knowles and Matt Walsh and they put out an article saying this Daily Wire is a cesspit. It’s a cesspit of you know, what did they call it? A cesspool of hatred and bigotry, right? And then they play the stuff that they found — and it’s nothing. There’s no hatred and bigotry on it at all. But a lot of people pass this stuff around on Twitter and they don’t read the articles. They don’t know that, they think, “Oh Media Matters says Daily Wire is hateful and bigot[ed] and they just spread that around.”
And that’s the way it works. And if they can find, you know, some poor guy he’ll get picked for the draft and a football game or win the Heisman trophy or he’ll get picked up for a baseball team. Suddenly, they go back into his old twitters and find something he said when he was 13 that wasn’t quite woke. You know, and they destroy young people’s careers. They’ve been doing this for a long time.
Well, now The New York Times, a former newspaper, is shocked to discover that some conservatives are doing this right back at them, and they are very, very unhappy. Jeremy Peters writes:
PETERS: Trump allies …
See, they always have — anything they think is bad, they always have to get Trump into it. It’s nothing to do with whether Trump is doing this or is aware of it or anything like that, but they always have to get Trump into it. It’s like their 1619 project where they say everything about America is due to slavery, it’s like you know, Trump’s America traced back to slavery.
PETERS: Trump allies target journalists over coverage deemed hostile to the White House …
And then the story goes.
PETERS: A loose network of conservative operatives …
In other words, a bunch of people.
PETERS: … allied with the White House …
They’re conservatives.
PETERS: … is pursuing what they say will be an aggressive operation to discredit news organizations deemed hostile to President Trump by publicizing damaging information about journalists. It’s the latest step in a long running effort by Mr. Trump …
Whom they haven’t proved has anything to do with us whatsoever, but it is in The New York Times, a former newspaper.
PETERS: … the latest step in a long running effort by Mr. Trump and his allies to undercut the influence of legitimate news reporting.
You get this, what’s being done is illegitimate. But the reporting is so — it is so legitimate, it is so news.
PETERS: Four people familiar with the operation …
Not one, not two, not three.
PETERS: Four people familiar with the operation described how it works, asserting that it has compiled dossiers of potentially embarrassing social media posts and other public statements by hundreds of people who work at some of the country’s most prominent news organizations.
They have been doing this to us at The New York Times. The New York Times has been doing [it] but let alone The New York Times, certainly at Media Matters for years for years and years. Now it’s been turned against them, and they [aren’t] happy. Here is the author of the piece on Morning Joe — Jeremy Peters — and please, play the first one of his clips.
PETERS: This is just the latest escalation under a president who has called the media the enemy of the people. And what that has effectively done is embolden the president’s allies, this group of people who are connected to Donald Trump Jr., to start looking at the online histories — going back in some cases more than a decade — of journalists who in some cases don’t even cover this administration.
And what they’ve done is they’ve tried to pull embarrassing things find unflattering things in the social media histories of these journalists and I’m talking about journalists at the nation’s top news organizations like The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN — entities which have already been targeted by these conservative allies of the president — and what they do is they publicize unflattering things that they’ve found in these social media histories when they want to retaliate against an outlet for publishing a story that is unflattering to the president. So what you have here, really, is something very different from what basic journalism is.
Okay, ok, Jerr. Let’s find out what basic journalism is — he says these people are targeting someone. They’re not targeting crappy little places like us, like the Daily Wire where evil cesspool guys like me are there. These are guys [who] are targeting serious big time news organizations like CNN. So let’s go over to CNN where Brian Stelter is interviewing psychiatrist Dr. Allen Frances about Donald Trump, and notice just how Brian Stelter pushes back against Dr. Allen Frances’ assertions. Listen to this.
FRANCES: Lumping the mentally ill with Trump is a terrible insult to the mentally ill, and they have enough problems and stigma as it is. The second issue is that calling Trump crazy hides the fact that we’re crazy for having elected him, and even crazier for allowing his crazy policies to persist.
Trump is as destructive a person in this century as Hitler, Stalin, and Mao were in the last century. He may be responsible for many more million deaths than they were. He needs to be contained but he needs to be contained by attacking his policies not his person. It’s crazy for us to be destroying the climate our children will live in. It’s crazy to be giving tax cuts to the rich that will add trillions of dollars to the debt our children will have to pay. It’s crazy to be destroying our democracy by claiming that the press and the courts are the enemy of the people. We have to face these policies, not Trump’s person.
So it’s an insult to the mentally ill to call Trump mentally ill, but we can attack — we have to take his policies, not him personally. And then he goes on to say that, you know, he’s as bad as Stalin and Hitler because he’s killed as many millions as they did. I wish I had a list of names to find out who he’s killed but never mind that.
As I was watching this guy, I kept thinking that they were going to discover the real psychiatrist tied up in the asylum from which this guy had escaped. You know, he’s like, “I’m a psychiatrist.” Like it was a scene from a bad horror movie. But this is — so, Jeremy Peters feels that CNN — I mean this is a serious show, Brian Stelter is one of their big guys, right? This is their journalism show. Jeremy Peters feels that this is untoward — it is unbelievable — that people should be attacking really respectable news outlets like CNN where that clown is talking absolute nonsense with exactly zero pushback from Brian Stelter, Mr. Potato Head.
[Stelter] said absolutely nothing to shut this guy down who by the way was violating the ethical standards of the American Psychiatry Association. Ever since this psychiatrist did this to a Goldwater, back in the day when Goldwater was running for president and they were so horrified that a conservative Republican was running, psychiatrist came out and said he was crazy and they put out a paper and the American Psychiatry Association said, no it’s not ethical to discuss the mental health of someone you have never talked to. You’ve never treated him, so how do you know what his problems are?
So the guy’s acting unethically to begin with, but he’s also talking absolute crap. I mean, anybody who came on this show or any responsible show who started to say, Oh Nancy Pelosi has killed millions of people. And you know, the first thing I’d say is name one. How has she killed anybody? What are you talking about? I mean, a guy like that would never get past me probably to get on here in the first place, but that is the kind of person — that’s the kind of news that’s coming out.
The front page of The New York Times looks like that every single day. And so if there are people going out and going after those journalists, they are not going after respectable people they’re going after the — We already know Dean Baguette had a meeting with his staff and his staff was saying, How are we going to get Trump now? Our Russia hoax blew up in our faces, What now? Baquet? Backet? Whatever his name is, said, Well don’t worry now we’re gonna call them racist right up until 2020, and we’re gonna hit him with that racist thing forever until we get him. As one of the journalists said, we want to get Trump. So what is he talking about, Why shouldn’t they be attacked when they are attacking the Right in the same way? They are not respectable journalistic outlets, they just think they are, because they’re surrounded by people who agree with them.
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