CNN’s Stelter Burns Trump for ‘Celebrating His Own Ignorance’ After a Week of False Hurricane Claims
CNN’s Brian Stelter ripped President Donald Trump on Sunday for his week-long attempt to mislead the American public with his claims about Hurricane Dorian’s impact.
Stelter kicked off his Reliable Sources reality check monologue by acknowledging Trump’s latest tweet bashing the media coverage over #SharpieGate.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 8, 2019
Stelter described Trump’s tweet as “celebrating his own ignorance” before leaping into a dissection of Trump’s media attacks and week-long campaign to claim his errant storm forecast was right.
As the CNN host lamented Trump’s “daily attempt to deny reality” and attempts to make the government back him up, Stelter assessed that the media coverage “actually helped Trump” by not properly conveying the seriousness of his false claims.
“The words we use, the framing we choose treats the absurd and the aberrant like it’s reasonable, like it’s normal. Take the term Sharpiegate. It’s a funny term, I admit, but it indicates that Trump getting the facts wrong in an emergency is just a joke…But this was not a joke to the folks in Alabama who saw Trump’s tweet that said Alabama will much likely be hit much harder than anticipated.”
Stelter emphasized that the story was Trump attempts to lie about a hurricane, but he continued the media scrutiny by saying “instead of doubling down, we should probably be saying he dug his hole even deeper…Trump continued to confuse people by spreading bogus information.”
“That would be a lot more accurate than saying Sharpiegate Day Six,” Stelter said. “No matter how much Trump complains about the media, we have to make sure we’re getting these frames right, making sure we’re getting this language right.”
He concluded with “the media actually lets Trump off pretty easy. Most of the coverage is not showing this spasm of Tweets through the frame of his instability, questioning his critical thinking skills. Most of the coverage is not conveying just how appalled scientists and forecasters are.”
Watch above, via CNN.
