Ingraham: Media Needs to Treat Trump with Same Standards as Obama, Clinton
Lifezette - Tuesday November 22, 2016
by Kathryn Blackhurst
LifeZette Editor-in-Chief Laura Ingraham called on the mainstream media to utilize the same standards for President-Elect Donald Trump afforded to President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during an interview with Democratic strategist David Axelrod Tuesday on “The Laura Ingraham Show.”
Trump’s refusal to cater to media outlets that portrayed him “inaccurately” and “with a nasty tone” has been met — unsurprisingly — with backlash from many in the mainstream media. Ingraham chided these media figures for suggesting Trump poses a “threat to our democracy” by stiff-arming biased outlets.
“I don’t think it’s a big mystery that he has his issues with the media because all you have to do is read his Twitter feed to know that.”
“I think [Trump’s] just saying, ‘Look, if you’re a fair journalist and you treat me fairly and, even if you’re tough, you’re fair — that’s fine. But if you become an advocate for a particular point of view, then you’re no longer really a journalist,'” Ingraham told Axelrod. “‘You’re an advocate and will be treated as such.’ That’s where I think he is on this.”
The most recent controversy occurred Tuesday morning when Trump tweeted that he had canceled a meeting that day with The New York Times because the terms and conditions of the meeting had allegedly been changed. Claiming that The Times had already covered him “inaccurately” and “with a nasty tone,” Trump made no secret of his disdain for the outlet.
Although Trump appeared to reconcile with The Times and later tweeted that the meeting had been rescheduled for Tuesday afternoon, the president-elect’s disregard for the “dishonest” media was a defining component of his campaign.
In fact, when Trump met with top media executives from major news networks Monday afternoon, the president-elect reportedly gave them the scolding of their lives, according to the New York Post.
“I don’t think it’s a big mystery that he has his issues with the media because all you have to do is read his Twitter feed to know that,” Axelrod, a former senior adviser to President Obama and chief strategist for Obama’s presidential campaigns, told Ingraham.
“Part of being president is submitting yourself to scrutiny, whether it’s in a press conference or an interview. And I hope that he does some of that,” Axelrod added. “You have to have a very thick skin to be president of the United States. And criticism is as American as apple pie … and one has to be able to deal with that.”
Although Ingraham agreed that it is important for the president to be accessible to the public and develop a thick skin, she swiftly pointed out how glowingly the media portrayed Obama during his days in office and how hard the media pulled all the stops to fight to protect Clinton during her failed presidential bid against Trump – a candidate that they obviously loathed.
"The press should deal with this with the same intensity or lack thereof that they dealt with Mrs. Clinton at the State Department," Ingraham countered.
"I think there are many occasions that I could point to where Barack Obama had a very thin skin, and I think people kind of forget about that. He got a lot of glowing coverage in the first 100 days," Ingraham added. "I remember, and I'm sure you remember as well, a lot of folks were not happy that President Obama went months and months and months without having a press conference … and then the last couple months of the campaign, Mrs. Clinton hardly did any interviews, any sit-downs with anybody. And the press was not happy about it but it wasn't kind of the — I don't think it was the kind of drumbeat and the threats to democracy it's being portrayed as now with Trump."
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