Howard Kurtz has joined the frenzy in his cynical piece titled Trump fuels a media furor (again) with Second Amendment comments on Clinton, this time over Republican Party Presidential candidate Donald Trump’s remark, concerning Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s naked attack on the 2nd Amendment, that 2nd Amendment supporters would exercise their considerable political power to protect this fundamental American right.
This is what Trump actually said.
If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know. But I’ll tell you what, that will be a horrible day.
This is the heart of Kurtz’ claim:
Donald Trump has talked himself into big trouble—and this time it’s not the fault of what he calls the “dishonest media.”
The media’s frenzied claim that Trump is inciting violence is truly breathtaking. It also takes a truly sick mind—or a wholly dishonest one—to manufacture violence out of a prediction of strong political repercussion.
Kurtz then asked,
I don’t believe Donald Trump wants to incite violence against Hillary Clinton. But does he bear responsibility for an aside, or a joke, that many people heard that way?
And yet here is Kurtz carefully keeping exactly that distortion alive as though it were a legitimate interpretation. This interpretation is manufactured entirely out of whole cloth by a media Kurtz himself has already called out as in the bag for Clinton. The only people who “heard” Trump’s remark as a call for violence are Democrats who want to make personal political hay, no matter how much they have to twist facts to harvest it, and a press that has dishonestly chosen to take sides in a political contest that is for us voters alone to decide.
And as Kurtz ironically noted
This uproar is going to dominate the next few days, all but drowning out Trump’s message (and is drowning out the new controversy over emails showing favor-seeking between the Clinton Foundation and Clinton’s State Department).
Of course it is. That’s the point of the press’ manufacture. The decision to distort and then to hype the distortion is entirely the press’. Just as it’s entirely the press’ choice to spike Democratic Party Ohio Senate candidate Ted Strickland’s yukking it up over how nice it was that Justice Antonin Scalia had died. Or to conveniently forget about then-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Barack Obama’s remark about doing things “the Chicago way,” and about bringing guns to a knife fight. Nobody has stuck a gun in the press’ ear and made them do any of that.
Does Trump bear responsibility for the behavior of a mendacious media?
Of course not. Apparently Kurtz doesn’t believe his own press.