Jake Tapper’s appearance on Bill Maher provided some hope about the future of Media coverage in challenging government, but the interview also got back to partisan double standards. The Hill summarized some of the good points (with full video above):
CNN’s Jake Tapper on Friday tore into President Trump’s claims of news media bias, saying “there’s no bias when it comes to facts and there’s no bias when it comes to decency.”
“I’ve never really seen this level of falsehood,” Tapper said on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher.”
“Just quantitatively. It’s not just, ‘If you like your doctor you can keep your doctor,’ it’s conspiracy theories based on nothing that have members of his own party distancing themselves from him.”
Maher noted that Tapper “sounds different” lately in adopting a more critical style in “speaking truth to crazy.”
“Politicians lie. It wasn’t invented on January 20,” Tapper said, but Trump is trying to “discredit the entire fourth estate, the entire media, we’re all fake news except for ‘Fox And Friends.’ ”
“The truth of the matter is that there’s no bias when it comes to facts and there’s no bias when it comes to decency,” Tapper added. “It is empirically indecent to make fun of the disabled. You don’t have to be a Democrat or a Republican or Independent or socialist or libertarian. That is just indecent. My children know better than that.”
Having the media point out when Trump is lying is far better than the common practice of the media reporting what both side say as if they are equally valid. Trump lies quite frequently in an administration which has become known for its use of alternative facts, and this should be pointed out. The news media provides an important service when it points out when politicians are lying.
While I applaud Tapper for trying to hold Trump accountable, he did drop the ball when Bill Maher reverted to partisanship in complaining about the coverage of Hillary Clinton’s scandals. Clinton violated email policies established to promote transparency in government as documented in the State Department Inspector General report, and then went on to repeatedly lie about the situation. This included her lies about the initial FBI report. Clinton’s statement that, “Director Comey said my answers were truthful” was the first lie listed by Glenn Kessler (listed in no particular order) in his listing of The biggest Pinocchios of 2016. She also grossly violated the ethics agreement she entered into before being confirmed as Secretary of State.
Candidates of both parties should be held accountable for their lying.
