by CHQ Staff
Last month Rasmussen Reports conducted a telephone and online survey that found just 32 percent of Likely U.S. Voters trust the political news they are getting. Most (54 percent) do not. Fourteen percent were not sure.
The results of the survey demonstrate that distrust of political news reporting remains at a record high, with just over half of voters now convinced that most in the media are out to get President Trump.
Forty-four percent of voters told Rasmussen they believe most reporters are trying to block Trump from passing his agenda. By comparison, 48 percent said most reporters were trying to help President Obama pass his agenda in 2010.
The telephone and online survey found that 63 percent of Likely Republican Voters believe that it is not possible for President Trump to do anything that the media will approve of and even voters not affiliated with either major political party by a 50 percent to 32 percent margin say it is not possible for the president to ever do anything the media will sign off on.
And among voters who Strongly Approve of the job Trump is doing, 84 percent feel that way.
Since that survey was conducted the establishment media has received even more self-inflicted damage to their credibility from the latest smear of Justice Brett Kavanaugh by The New York Times and the widely reported fake news of a “whistleblower” who claimed that President Trump made inappropriate commitments to a foreign leader.
The New York Times’ Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly spread the smear of Justice Kavanaugh through a new book, The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation and an article in a Sunday edition of The New York Times.
As our friends Mollie Hemingway of The Federalist and Carrie Severino of the Judicial Crisis Network pointed out, the book indicated that the alleged victim did not remember the incident, but the Times editors chose to leave that little detail out of their newspaper article promoting the book.
Ms. Severino also tweeted that the person making the accusation, Max Stier, “was a member of Bill Clinton’s defense team back during the Lewinsky investigation.”
But that little detail was likewise omitted from the book and newspaper article.
In the case of the fake news about President Trump’s conversation with the President of Ukraine the source was even thinner.
A source in the “intelligence community” alleged that Trump pressured President Zelensky to investigate Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden family’s dealings, citing those claims to revive calls for impeachment.
Except it turns out this “whistleblower” who sparked the controversy over President Trump’s July phone call with Ukraine’s president did not have “firsthand knowledge” of the conversation.
It’s unclear if the individual read a transcript of the call, heard about it in conversation, or learned of it another way.
And, as Jake Gibson and Alex Pappas of FOX News pointed out, typically, multiple U.S. officials are on such calls with the president, so this would indicate the whistleblower is not one of those people.
So, why not run down one of those other officials with firsthand knowledge before running with the story?
One reason is the one believed by 50 percent of Independents and 63 percent of Republicans, which is that nothing Trump does will satisfy his detractors in the establishment media.
But another good reason is the one tweeted by President Trump himself:
Now that the Democrats and the Fake News Media have gone “bust” on every other of their Witch Hunt schemes, they are trying to start one just as ridiculous as the others, call it the Ukraine Witch Hunt, while at the same time trying to protect Sleepy Joe Biden. Will fail again!
Biden’s ties with the Washington media establishment are long and deep, and so far he has gotten every break and every excuse for his gaffe-ridden campaign that the media could possibly give him, so insulating “Sleepy Joe” from the scandal of his intervention on behalf of his son’s shady dealings in Ukraine would be all in a day’s work for Biden’s media allies.
The problem for Sleepy Joe, and the establishment media is that their efforts to destroy Trump are having the opposite effect – the media’s credibility is being destroyed, Biden is falling fast to Elizabeth Warren and, according to Rasmussen’s daily tracking poll 52 percent of Likely U.S. Voters approve of President Trump’s job performance. Forty-six percent disapprove.
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Photo “Donald Trump Rally” by Epoch Times. CC BY 2.0.
