September 26, 2016

Poor Howie is terribly unhappy with his rival networks for fact-checking Hair Drumpf in their chyrons. It's rather ironic and pathetic to say the least to watch Kurtz complaining about media bias in covering Trump when Politico just published an article the day before discussing the fact that Trump lied once every three minutes and fifteen seconds over a five-day period.

Hey Howard, here's a thought. Maybe if your candidate didn't literally have lies spewing out of his mouth every few minutes where it's impossible to keep up with him, those other networks wouldn't have felt the fact-checking banners were necessary. Fox of course is more than happy to help him spread the lies, so you'll never see it happen over there.

Here's transcript via Media Matters:

HOWARD KURTZ (HOST): The other two cable news networks are using a new weapon against Donald Trump, the chyron. Those are the banners you see at the bottom of the screen. They now use them for fact-checking and sometimes for snark. CNN may have been there first. There was this one: "Trump calls Obama founder of ISIS (he's not)." And this one: "Trump's son: father apologized to Khans (he hasn't)." And this one: "Trump never said Japan should have nukes (he did.)" MSNBC has gotten into the act with this chyron: after Trump acknowledged that President Obama was born in the U.S., "birther-in-chief reborn." And this one: "Trump (falsely) claims Clinton started birther controversy." And here are others on MSNBC: "Trump says he watched (nonexistent) video of Iran receiving cash." "Trump: Clinton is in hiding (speaking next hour)." Now it isn't that all these are wrong, but sometimes the situation is a bit more complicated. Trump wasn't arguing that President Obama was literally the founder of ISIS, just that his policies helped fuel it’s growth. It's hard to make those distinctions in five or six words. And the other day Donald Trump called for profiling of terrorists.

[BEGIN VIDEO]

DONALD TRUMP: They profile. They see somebody that's suspicious, they will profile, they will take that person and they'll check out. Do we have a choice? Look what's going on. Do we really have a choice?

[END VIDEO]

KURTZ: CNN ran this banner: "Trump says, quote, 'racial profiling’ will stop terror.'" Trump never said the word "racial." We can debate whether or not that would be the net effect, but that chyron was factually inaccurate. If CNN or MSNBC has ever used this approach with Hillary Clinton and her various controversies, well, I must have missed that.

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