Federalist Senior Editor Mollie Hemingway joined Fox News’s “Media Buzz” on Sunday to talk about the White House’s war against the press. On Saturday, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer made claims about the size of the crowds at the Inauguration Day events, which spurred criticisms from reporters.
“It is absolutely true that the media were utterly obsessed about making the inauguration seem small, trying to denigrate everything that happened on Inauguration Day, and I think what the administration is doing is saying: ‘We’re not going to take this lying down,” Hemingway said. “The media are years into a war with Donald Trump — they’re not even hiding it — and the administration is letting them know they’re not just going to take it like Republicans normally do.”
“The media took it lying down for eight years when the press secretary of other people in the Obama administration explicitly said false things about Benghazi, lied about the extent of the IRS targeting of conservatives, lied about cash transfers to Iran, bragged about making an echo chamber to pass the Iran deal, and had a president himself saying repeatedly ‘If you like your healthcare plan you can keep it’ a gazillion times while millions of people lost their healthcare plans,” she said. “A media that doesn’t push back against that type of falsehood for eight years and then gets all upset at Sean Spicer talking about numbers is not going to be taken seriously at all.”
Many members of the media criticized Trump’s inaugural speech as being “dark,” while others flatly stated that Trump is the “worst,” namely David Frum of The Atlantic.
“This is a really important reason why people need more diversity in newsrooms,” Hemingway said. “That speech played completely differently to average Americans who voted for Donald Trump than it does to David Frum, who has hated Donald Trump for years. You need to have some perspective from people who heard in fact a very inspiring call to unity and were very excited again about his call to destroy Washington DC’s established order.”
