Coordinated: Movie Based on NYT's Trump Tax Story to Release 5 Days After Story Published
Is there a coordinated effort to undermine President Donald Trump from the media and entertainment industries?
Not so long ago, reporters and filmmakers were worlds apart. Sure, both fields attracted more than their fair share of liberals, however the two areas had very different objectives.
Hollywood was meant to entertain, while the fifth estate was there to inform and report. There was sometimes crossover, but the two paths generally stayed clear of each other.
It looks like the left has given up all pretense of keeping entertainment and journalism separate.
Showtime, the same mega-network that brought us “Dexter” and “Shameless,” just revealed it is collaborating with The New York Times on an anti-Trump TV movie.
“Showtime announced Tuesday evening it will air a new documentary film centered on a bombshell New York Times report alleging President Trump accrued millions of dollars from ‘dubious’ tax schemes,” reported The Hill.
There’s no doubt that the entertainment network coordinated with The Times to produce the film. Filmmakers reportedly embedded with investigative reporters for over a year to make the piece before the anti-Trump newspaper ink had even dried.
“The film follows a team of New York Times investigative reporters through their diligent and intense efforts in uncovering the information that led to this exclusive report,” explained Showtime.
It was unclear why filmmakers ignored opportunities to cover known Democratic tax cheats like Al Sharpton, or investigate Clinton Foundation corruption instead. Apparently, spreading unproven allegations that hurt Trump was more important.
“The Family Business: Trump and Taxes,” as the film is titled, is set to be released Sunday, less than a week after the companion piece from The New York Times was published.
In the article, published Tuesday, journalists admitted to using “confidential tax returns and financial records” to allege that Trump and his late father repeatedly dodged taxes — a reporting practice we know is only acceptable if done by liberals.
Many of those tax records are not public information, which means The Times likely broke privacy safeguards and possibly bent laws to write its report.
“The New York Times’s allegations of fraud and tax evasion are 100 percent false, and highly defamatory,” Charles J. Harder, an attorney for Trump, stated in response to the lengthy article.
“There was no fraud or tax evasion by anyone. The facts upon which The Times bases its false allegations are extremely inaccurate,” he added.
The Times openly admitted that the IRS didn’t seem to have a problem with how the Trump family tax filings were handled, many of which occurred after the president’s parents passed away almost 20 years ago.
All in all, The Times’ “bombshell” story seems to be that Donald Trump is wealthy — something we already knew — and probably doesn’t like paying more taxes than the law says he should. Stop the presses.
Showtime can run whatever programming it thinks will do well, but it’s hard to imagine viewers signing up for an expensive entertainment package only to find yawn-inducing documentaries slamming Trump instead. It’s all so predictably blasé.
The bigger story is that coordinated political attacks from Hollywood and journalists are now the norm. Reporting-as-entertainment is a strange mix, but nothing seems off limits for the left when it comes to slamming a Republican president.
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