RUSH: Now, speaking of the media. We learned over the weekend that Trump had a meeting with the new publisher of the New York Times. This is the son of Arthur Sulzberger Jr., nicknamed Pinch. Pinch’s father was Punch so they called little Punch, Pinch. And now Pinch’s son, A. G. Sulzberger is the publisher. And Trump met with A. G. Sulzberger and James Bennet, who’s the editor of the editorial page.
Trump tweeted: “Had a very good and interesting meeting at the White House with A.G. Sulzberger, Publisher of the New York Times. Spent much time talking about the vast amounts of Fake News being put out by the media & how that Fake News has morphed into phrase, ‘Enemy of the People.’ Sad!”
The publisher of the New York Times, A. G. Sulzberger, the son of Pinch who was the son of Punch, said yesterday that “he implored President Trump at a private White House meeting to reconsider his broad attacks on journalists, calling the president’s anti-press rhetoric, ‘not just divisive, but increasingly dangerous.’ Sulzberger said his main purpose for accepting the meeting with Trump was to raise concerns about the president’s deeply troubling anti-press rhetoric.”
I don’t think that’s what the president’s concerned with. The president probably met with them because he’s a little fed up. The New York Times goes so far beyond bias what they’re doing to Trump. They are literally making it up! That’s really all they would have to do, if they’re really worried, stop making up the news. Stop running some of the most outrageous, egregious BS stories that could be conceived of.
How many stories have there been in the New York Times promising the end of Donald Trump, assuring us that this, whatever the event happened to be, the last year and a half, how many such stories have there been that this is the beginning of the end? Paul Krugman writing that a recession is now guaranteed after Trump was elected. Guaranteed to have a crippling economic recession. What’s happened? We’ve got economic growth we haven’t seen in decades. Is anybody at the Times discredited? No.
We’ve had how many stories with anonymous sources from the deep state assuring us that Trump was colluding with Putin, that Trump colluded with Russia. How many stories have we had the Steele dossier verifying that it was true? There has been so much BS about Trump that the bullets that are flying are being fired by Democrats at Republicans! Nobody’s firing bullets at Democrats.
But speaking of which, have you seen all of the stories about the Trump star out on the Hollywood walk of fame? Second time the thing has been totally defaced with a pickax. Here’s a couple of headlines. “Shock video: Brawl breaks out at Trump’s star on Hollywood Boulevard. Youth pastor assaulted and robbed for wearing ‘Make America Great Again’ gear.” “Bomb squad called after suspicious package is found at Trump Tower.”
What I want to know is report Democrats calling for civility and calm? There have been 500 different people attacked, Trump supporters, in recent months by deranged lunatic followers of the Drive-By Media and the New York Times.
Let’s not forget, does the name Robert Creamer ring a bell to you? Let me remind you. Trump had a rally in Chicago. They had to cancel it, had to postpone it for a day because they got word that anti-Trump people had infiltrated the supposed pro-Trump crowd and had gotten in there and were gonna raise hell; so they shut down the rally, they postponed it.
It turns out that Robert Creamer, who is the husband of Illinois Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky, was a frequent visitor to the Oval Office, and some of those visitors personally met with President Obama. You know what Creamer was doing? Creamer was being paid by the Hillary Clinton campaign to hire mobsters. He was hiring people to be violent at Trump rallies.
Now, here’s Mr. Sulzberger complaining about Trump’s rhetoric and all it might do to journalists when in fact the people being shot at and the people being beaten up are Republicans and Trump supporters. Now, that’s right. Elected Republicans were sprayed with bullets at a baseball practice. Trump supporters are beat up at Trump rallies thanks to Obama’s henchman, Robert Creamer. Trump supporters wearing making Make America Great hats with attacked they’re bullied they’re run out of businesses, they’re run out of school quadrangles and auditoriums.
Trump’s supporters are called Nazis and fascists, an atmosphere is created where attacking them is a moral thing to do. One of our most famous leftist celebrities said she thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House. Not a thing was done to her. That was the lovely and gracious Madonna. Conservatives are afraid for their lives when they’re invited to speak on college campi.
Now, here comes Little Pinch’s son worried here about what Trump claims fake news are doing to journalists. Now, I realize some of you might be saying, “Rush, wrong attitude. Somebody’s gotta be bigger than anybody else to stop this. If we keep going tit-for-tat, well, you did this; so we’re gonna do that.”
My contention is that we didn’t start anything. We mind our own business. We get attacked simply for thinking what we think. We get attacked for simply not believing and loving them. We get attacked for daring to show up and challenge what they believe. They’re the ones out there trying to drum up advertising bans. They’re trying to destroy careers. They’re doing great injurious things to bodily harm and so forth, and now here comes Mr. Sulzberger worried about what isn’t happening?
Where is this concern for Republicans being shot up at baseball practice? Where are the Democrats calling for calm and civility amongst the resistance? You don’t hear it. They don’t want any calm. They don’t want this to be shut down.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Back to the phones. Kathleen in Molene, Illinois. You’re next great to have you on the EIB Network. Hi.
CALLER: Hi. Hi, Rush. Love you. I’m calling because I want to discuss the difference between freedom of speech and freedom of the press, and I think there’s a big difference there. I want to equate… I think that the Big Media are businessmen. They’re selling a product. They’re selling stories that are reported in their newspapers and on the televisions and within the media.
Much the same as Big Tobacco was selling a product — tobacco — that helped to poison the American people. We passed the Truth in Advertising Act to control the advertising that tobacco and other advertisers put out because they were selling a product, and that did not infringe on freedom of speech. I almost think we should have something very similar like the Truth in Reporting Act. Reporting should be reporting the truth.
You know, they can editorialize all they want, as long as they identify it as an editorial. If they want spew forth their own opinion and their own bias it needs to be identified as editorial, not as reporting. If they’re reporting a story, they should report the facts, they should report the truth, and there should be some way of legislating that, actually. I don’t find any problem in creating a Truth in Reporting Act like we have a Truth in Advertising Act.
RUSH: Well —
CALLER: It does not — it would not — impinge on freedom of speech.
CALLER: Well, it just simply needs to be researched, and it needs to be a reporting of fact. If they cannot support that it’s a reporting of facts —
RUSH: But we can’t agree —
CALLER: — then it doesn’t belong in the story.
RUSH: We can’t even agree on scientific fact because there are some people that don’t… Everything has been so politicized that there aren’t any facts. There’s yours and then there’s mine, and then we have an argument over who can persuade who that our facts are correct. There isn’t a single arbiter of this stuff. That’s why, you know, there are moves on to make sure that Facebook and Twitter stop shadow banning conservatives. You want to give Twitter that kind of power, or do we want to give the government the power to regulate what can be said and not said on Twitter and Facebook? I think this needs to be really be thought about. You know, I’m in the free speech business. Without it, I don’t exist.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: I don’t want somebody out there determining whether or not what I’m saying is “true” or not because how do I know I can trust them to be unbiased and objective? The First Amendment wouldn’t permit it anyway. The First Amendment deals specifically with the government being not permitted to do anything. It was specifically about political speech. The government cannot infringe on anybody’s political speech no matter what, no matter you want to call it.
CALLER: Yeah, that’s fine as long as it’s identified as political speech, as editorialism. (sic) But if it’s strictly reporting of a factual story, you know, how can we…? What can we do to prevent them from printing outright falsehoods?
RUSH: Well, we’re doing what we can do. Starting in 1988, we created an alternative media. Back before 1988, there literally was no way to react to any of this. NBC, ABC, CBS, the New York Times, the Washington Post — USA Today had been up and at it not too long — could write and broadcast whatever they wanted, and you had the magazines. You had maybe some individual radio programs, various markets. Not too many. But on a national basis there wasn’t anywhere you could go.
Then I did my TV show from 1992 to 1996, and I grew tired of television. Fox News starts in 1997. You know, nine years after this program kicks off. Roger Ailes is the executive producer of my TV show. When that ended, he goes to Fox News and starts the Fox News Channel; as we know it exists now, Fox Business News. So there has sprung up now this entire alternative media which deals 80% with refuting the crap that’s in the mainstream media. That’s much of what it does. In fact, way too much of that.
I think there’s not enough advancement of our own ideas because every day we’re under assault. We get up every day and somebody or some group of people we love or some issue or some aspect of America that we love is under assault. We have to defend it each and every day, because that’s what the left is doing: Attacking virtually every institution and tradition and person that has made this country great. But we’re never gonna get…
Your idea simply isn’t workable. The only person who could serve the role that you are seeking is God — and, sadly, we’re not gonna be able to do that. There isn’t anybody… You know, just distinguishing between this is opinion and this is news? I can’t tell the difference anymore. The New York Times editorial page may as well be on page 1, as far as I’m concerned. But it isn’t. They’ve got their editorial page and have got their page 1, and they don’t call what’s on page 1 editorial, unless they sometimes will refer to something as news analysis.
There simply isn’t this arbiter out there who is untouched and immune from all bias, who could be the arbiter on what’s fact and what isn’t and whose judgment could be used to take people to court for lying in the news. The answer to this has always been more speech. That’s the point of the First Amendment. It also happens to be what the left is trying to shut down. The left has been trying to run this show out of business with various techniques, and not just this.
They’ve been trying to ruin individual hosts on Fox News. You name it. That’s what they do. They run against, they run up to people who are effective critics of what they believe in and they not interested in debate. They try to destroy credibility, jobs, what have you. But the answer to what they’re doing is more speech, and we have these opportunities. Now, one of the problems — one of the many — is that when we look at the left as media, we see people unified.
And, you know what? It is pretty unified. If you miss what the New York Times says, no big deal. Read the Washington Post. If you miss the Washington Post, no big deal. Turn on the CBS News. If you miss all those, no big deal. Turn on the NBC News. And if you’ve missed all of those, you still have ABC to tune to — and if you haven’t seen any of that, go to CNN. And if you’ve run out of CNN, pick up USA Today.
They want to get along with ’em and not be in their crosshairs. But it’s so much better today than it was when I was a kid. If you watch the NBC Nightly News, my dad would start pounding the table — and if Sander Vanocur did something during the Republican convention? (Snort!) You wanted to be there just to see my dad’s reaction to Sander Vanocur or anybody who loved the Kennedys. But outside of my dad, where’d you go?
There was nowhere else in media to react to Sander Vanocur or NBC, ABC, CBS. Today there is — and in the universe of cable, Fox News is destroying everybody, and if you want to… You know, this guy Thomas Frank on C-SPAN2 Book TV equated me with the guy in North Korea talking to the population on the megaphone every day at a time people have to listen. That’s not me. That’s CNN. CNN in the airport!
The only thing you can watch on TV in an airport is CNN. They are the equivalent of North Korea, not me. Now, I understand your frustration. I have a friend who so despises the media and who so convinced that the media is the… My friend said to me the other day, “You know, Rush, if every dream we have came true — if we started winning every issue and every election that mattered — we still would have the media.
“We’d still have to overcome the media. The media is still never gonna be on our side.” His idea was he wanted me to call learned people I know in the judicial community and ask if it be possible to file a RICO lawsuit against these people — a racketeering lawsuit — because they do seem to be so aligned. Literally, folks, it’s amazing. Miss CBS, no big deal. Watch NBC. Miss that, no big deal. Watch ABC.
It’s amazing the same stories in the same order with the same thought. If you want to watch “hate Trump,” you got your pick of 15 different outlets and it’s all gonna be the same stuff. You can make book on it. Anyway, I appreciate the sentiment. I know the frustration. But there simply isn’t any way to do it. The First Amendment was written to guarantee political speech from any infringement brought by the U.S. government.
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