It's about time someone told the rest of the media to stop cowering to Fox News. They. Don't. Matter. And by the way? You are never going to get a job there, Mr. Reporter, so stop hedging your coverage of them.
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JONATHAN CAPEHART, MSNBC: Concerns for Donald Trump's conflicts of interest are grow growing by the day. According to the President-elect, it's not a big deal. The media and American public remain in the dark about Trump's financial entanglements all over the globe. We've never seen his tax returns and now he is saying a presser is scheduled for "sometime in January." Trump has not held a true press conference since July and tweets and brief impromptu question and answer sessions outside his Mar-a-Lago resort don't count. Amidst outright lies from the President-elect. that "millions of illegals voted for his opponent" means the media must be vigilant with accuracy, context and tireless questioning. How do we in the media arise to the occasion?
..Kurt [Eichenwald], I have to start with you. Rather than address the legal controversy, Trump defends it on Twitter and complains about his son being pressured out of doing a fund-raiser. Here's the tweet below,
Wrong answer. The Trump Foundation is a major source of contention. He says he'll resolve it but the New York State Attorney General says he can't. What is going on here and how should the media go about reporting on this mixed messaging?
KURT EICHENWALD: The first thing we need to do is face reality. If Eric Trump is so upset, write a check! We've got to stop acting like everything that happens to this guy, when they complain about how difficult it is--if they want to give to charity, give to charity. They can write the money themselves, they don't need to raise it from us. Secondly, this is the most important. We have a President-elect who has been treated completely differently from anybody else. The press has unfortunately gotten into this thing where they're afraid of propaganda outlets like Fox News, coming in and calling them biased. There is no bias here.
We have got to grow a backbone. We have got to demand press conferences. We have got to stop covering his tweets like they're news. This man has some very serious questions to answer. We're getting to the point we should start to wonder: Is the problem that, he can't answer? That he doesn't have the intelligence to answer? That he's afraid to answer? We have to bear down on him and let the American public know that this is not normal, and when the Fox's of the world object to acting like a normal reporter as being biased? We should just point them out and say, "They're lying." Just ignore them.
