Sarah Sanders Tears into Media's Evil New Norm: They Were So Happy to Destroy a Kid's Life
When it comes to the media, nobody nails them like Sarah Sanders.
The White House press secretary, who has sometimes seemed more like a den mother or lunch-room monitor overseeing a room of rambunctious school kids pretending to be reporters, has gotten an up-close view of the media in her time with the Trump administration.
And in an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity this week, her disgust was on full display.
In a Tuesday night appearance on “Hannity,” Sanders addressed a range of media issues, starting with last week’s BuzzFeed “bombshell” about President Donald Trump allegedly instructing his former attorney Michael Cohen to lie to Congress. (A story that was debunked by no less a Trump foe than special counsel Robert Mueller)
But when she turned to the media malfeasance that marked the coverage of Friday’s confrontation between students from Covington Catholic High School in Kentucky and a Native American activist, Sanders really hit full stride.
And honest watchers of American news outlets – and the herd mentality that has dominated news coverage during the Trump years — could only nod in agreement.
“We have seen time and time again where they run out here with these outrageous ridiculous stories,” Sanders said.
“One person reports it to begin with and they all jump on it. We saw it again with the Covington students. I’ve never seen people so happy to destroy a kid’s life.”
(Note: Ignore the caption. The post was published by a liberal Twitter user apparently oblivious to the point Sanders was making. But the video is handy.)
Sarah Sanders: “I have never seen people so happy to destroy a kid’s Life.”
Just wait until she meets Kirstjen Nielsen!
— It is Happening Here (@jrrogersjr) January 23, 2019
By now, the basic facts of the Covington case are pretty well known.
The students who were in Washington for the annual March for Life protest against legalized abortion, were involved in a confrontation with Native American activist Nathan Phillips that was instigated by Phillips and fed by the raucous, racially tinged insults being hurled by a small group of fringe activists from a sect called the Black Hebrew Israelites.
The fact that some of the students involved sported Trump-supporting “Make America Great Again” hats made the incident that much more irresistible to the Trump-hating media.
And while the behavior of all of the teenagers involved couldn’t honestly be called exemplary, the outpouring of viciousness among the pundit class, celebrities and no-name liberals on social media was astonishing to see.
So-called “public intellectuals” talked openly about violence against the Covington youths:
Honest question. Have you ever seen a more punchable face than this kid’s? pic.twitter.com/jolQ7BZQPD
— Reza Aslan (@rezaaslan) January 20, 2019
An airhead C-list celebrity, who probably considers herself feminist, harkened back to the world’s oldest profession and offered a sexual favor for anyone (presumably male, considering the terms) who actually performed an act of violence.
The maelstrom of media activity even forced the school involved to cancel classes on Tuesday out of security concerns.
And all of that was due directly to the disgracefully one-sided initial coverage of the confrontation.
None of this happened in a vacuum, of course.
The vast majority of the mainstream news media has been at war with the Trump administration since even before the administration began – since the shocking results of the Nov. 8, 2016, election became clear.
The vote was a national repudiation of the liberal lies of the Obama administration, the political cant of the Democratic Party and – possibly most of all – the pretentious domination of American culture by a media elite that cares nothing about the precious liberties guaranteed by the American Constitution.
In a made-for-media moment, the Covington kids, with their anti-abortion stance, their MAGA hats, and their refusal to give ground for an “activist” the media has never been fully honest about, brought it all to the fore.
And the media reacted with ugly, one-sided and distorted coverage that fed a storm of liberal outrage that could well lead to lifetime consequences for the teenagers involved.
For the liberal media, those kids deserve anything they get, because they had the temerity to support the election results the American people delivered to the world more than two years ago.
Even if it meant journalists for some of the country’s best-known news outlets abandoned a foundational rule of the profession: Get it first, but first, get it right.
“When that becomes the norm in the media in America simply because they are associated with this president, that is disgraceful and that should never happen,” Sanders told Hannity.
“Let’s hope that this is a lesson to all of the media, to everyone. Let’s focus on getting things right, not getting them first.”
Considering the antagonistic record of the American media over two years of the Trump administration, and its fawning, blindly subservient behavior during the eight years of the Obama White House, there’s precious little chance of that actually happening.
But when it came to the media on Tuesday, as always, Sarah Sanders nailed it.
Truth and Accuracy
We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.
