In response to President Donald Trump's repeated attacks against the media, CNN's Jake Tapper highlighted the president's own hypocrisy and how he is often the one most guilty of promulgating "fake news."
"You might find it hard to believe, but the Trump White House today said it is wrong when people put out information that they know to be incorrect in an attempt to mislead the republic," Tapper said. "That's right. The White House run by the president who came to political prominence by promoting the lie that the first African-American president was born in Africa is finding time to take issue with those who mislead people."
Tapper pointed out several times in which the president, or the White House, misled the American public and how hypocritical it is that Trump's administration attempts to dictate the standard while utterly failing at following it themselves.
He added, "The White House run by the president who said with no evidence that crowds of American Muslims were seen on TV celebrating in New Jersey after 9/11, the man who repeated the ludicrous National Enquirer claim that Ted Cruz's father had something to do with the Kennedy assassination and the man who has said with no evidence that there were three to five million fraudulent votes for Hillary Clinton, that same president is taking issue with people being misled."
This issue came to a testy head during the most recent White House press briefing on Monday, in which press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders accused the media of, at times, intentionally misleading people.
"There's a very big difference between making honest mistakes and purposefully misleading the American people — something that happens regularly," Sanders said, without putting forth any substantive evidence to prove her assertion.
Viably angry, she berated the present press corps, adding that "when journalists make honest mistakes, they should own up to them."
In his segment on Monday, Tapper argued that journalists do indeed own up to their errors. "Now, there is an occasion and a serious issue for the White House and the president to take issue with," he said. "There have been a number of journalistic mistakes in recent weeks, ones that have been fixed and corrected by the news organizations in question, including CNN."
Tapper added, "But corrections notwithstanding, this has prompted further Trump's attacks on the press, tweets by the president against ABC News, against CNN, against 'The Washington Post,' a tweet insulting the intelligence of an individual journalist by name."
Indeed, there have been a handful of explosive stories involving connections between Trump and the Russian government in recent weeks which later fell apart. Those mistakes, however, were admitted, and corrections were issued, along with penalties for some of the journalists involved. It's an example of the kind of accountability that the White House has yet to show.
See all of Tapper's segment below.
Shares