Fox host Laura Ingraham and contributor Newt Gingrich went on a hate-filled streak of demonizing the media for debunking Donald Trump’s dishonest attempt to blame his own family separation policy on Barack Obama. Yet Ingraham and Gingrich somehow ignored the very same fact checking that had occurred hours earlier on Fox News.
Yesterday afternoon, Fox News anchor Shepard Smith debunked Donald Trump’s dishonest attempt to blame President Barack Obama for child separations at the border. We saw a clip of Trump saying, “Just so you understand, President Obama separated the children. Those cages that were shown, I think they were very inappropriate. They were built by President Obama’s administration, not by Trump. President Obama had child separation. … We all know it. I’m the one that stopped it.”
Then, “separating rhetoric from reality,” as he put it, Smith explained the facts:
SMITH: The Obama administration tended to keep families together. There were exceptions but it was not the policy to separate. … [In 2014], the Obama administration saw a surge in children and families from Central America. They started jailing families together as family units. And according to the reporting of our corporate cousins at The Wall Street Journal, and others, quoting, “Obama administration officials considered separating families but opted not to do so.” The Trump administration did separate families. The Trump Department of Homeland Security estimates more than 2300 children had been separated from their families by last spring. And the Trump administration did detain children in cages. An unknown number of those children is still not back with their families.
Last night, Ingraham and Gingrich used Trump’s comments to tear into the media that fact checked Trump’s lies, while ignoring similar fact checking at their own network. It was proof positive that Fox Trumpers disregard facts – and are allowed to do so by Fox management – for the sake of pro-Trump, anti-everyone else propaganda.
With unintentional hilarity, Ingraham promised her discussion with Gingrich would expose “how the Democrats in the media continue to cover up the Obama Administration's role in child separation at the border. Fact from fiction.” (Transcript excerpts via Fox News)
INGRAHAM: Mr. Speaker, did the media all of a sudden get Obama Administration amnesia here?
GINGRICH: No, not all of a sudden. The media has been operating for four to three years on the premise that if Donald Trump does something, it's evil and if the same thing is done by a Democrat, it must have really been good. This is who they are.
INGRAHAM: They're so obsessed with hating Trump that they've lost all - it's like someone obsessed -
GINGRICH: Right.
The two were just getting started with their inflammatory smears. Gingrich accused the debunkers of being “fake media” who “don’t have any interest in the truth.” He even had the nerve to liken fact checking to the Salem witch trials.
GINGRICH: Well, but I think you have to start with that notion, none of these people represent the news media. You could say that they represent fake media; you could represent - that they represent anti-Trump propaganda, but they don't have any interest in the truth. They want to know, what can they do today to hit Donald Trump and that's their whole lot method and it's a groupthink that it is pretty astonishing. And we have very seldom in our country's history seen the kind of groupthink that we now have.
In fact, I just did a newsletter in which I compared it to the Salem Witchcraft trials and to Savonarola in Florence in the 15th Century.
Project much, Mr. Cheater?
So, do Ingraham and Gingrich consider Fox’s news division part of the “fake media” or do they just not bother to pay it any attention or do they deliberately spread fake-news propaganda?
I report, you decide.
Watch Trump get debunked on the April 9, 2019 Shepard Smith Reporting below, via Contemptor. Underneath, Ingraham and Gingrich spread their America-hating lies, from the April 9, 2019 The Ingraham Angle.