18 February 2017

Donald Trump and Tony Blair February 2017

President’s Press Conference, The White House, 16 February 2017 

... And just while you’re at it, because you mentioned this, Wall Street Journal did a story today that was almost as disgraceful as the failing New York Time’s story, yesterday. And it talked about – these are… front page.

So director of national intelligence just put out, acting a statement, any suggestion that the United States intelligence community, this was just given to us, is withholding information and not providing the best possible intelligence to the president and his national security team is not true.  So they took this front page story out of The Wall Street Journal top and they just wrote the story that its not true. And I’ll tell you something, I’ll be honest, because I sort of enjoy this back and forth that I guess I have all my life but I’ve never seen more dishonest media than frankly, the political media. I thought the financial media was much better, much more honest.

But I will say that, I never get phone calls from the media. How did they write a story like that in The Wall Street Journal without asking me or how did they write a story in The New York Times, put it on front page? That was like the story they wrote about the women and me, front page, big massive story. And it was nasty and then they called, they said we never said that, we like Mr. Trump. They called up my office, we like Mr. Trump, we never said that.

And it was totally — they totally misrepresented those very wonderful women, I have to tell you, totally misrepresented. I said give us the retraction. They never gave us a retraction and frankly, I then went on to other things.
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Tony Blair's Speech on Brexit for Open Britain, London, 17 February 2017 

... There is an effective cartel of media on the right, which built the ramp for pro-Brexit propaganda during the campaign; is now equally savage in its efforts to say it is all going to be ‘great’ and anyone who says otherwise is a traitor or moaner; and who make it very clear to the PM that she has their adulation for exactly as long as she delivers Brexit.

It hugely skews the broadcast coverage. For example, a week ago there was the annual survey of top business bosses of the leading UK companies. Over half said Brexit was already having an adverse effect on their business. And half did not have confidence in the Government negotiating a good deal. It led the FT. It was barely covered elsewhere. The BBC had it as an item of business news. Suppose the survey had come to the opposite conclusion. It would have had at least 4 papers headlining it and would therefore have featured prominently on the broadcasts.
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2 comments:

  1. Although, for those of us who are slower on the uptake, I'd have welcomed an indication of Western Independent's reasons for reproducing these two pieces, I'll still venture a couple of comments.

    Interestingly, page 5 of today's issue of Private Eye also draws attention to the first of Blair's comments quoted above.

    Second, at least Blair's sentences are intelligible, unlike some of Trumps which appear to support the opinion of those who have expressed concerns about his mental faculties.

    David Martin
    22/2/2017

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  2. What intrigued me was that these two very different politicians - and I agree that Trump's semi-literate stream of consciousness is very different from Blair's well-honed speech - were both railing against the media when they don't like what's being expressed. I nearly highlighted "totally misrepresented" and "hugely skews".

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