As Fuzzy reported Sunday, the mainstream media ran wild over the weekend with blatantly biased articles and tweets on the speech President Trump gave Friday night at Mount Rushmore on the eve of Independence Day.
Some particularly dishonest news sites like the Washington Post falsely claimed Trump’s speech was a “harsh denunciation of the racial justice movement,” and an attempt at “preserv[ing] Confederate symbols and the legacy of white domination.”
Unfortunately, supposedly reputable media outlets like the Washington Post weren’t the only ones dishing out falsehoods regarding what happened during Trump’s visit to South Dakota.
South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R) also gave a speech that night and noted, among other things, that “we have been witnessing a very troubling situation unfold. In real-time, we are watching an organized, coordinated campaign to remove and eliminate all references to our nation’s founding, and many other points in our history.”
She further went on to point out that instead of “looking to the past to help improve our future, some are trying to wipe away the lessons of history. Lessons that we should be teaching to our children, and to our grandchildren. This approach focuses exclusively on our forefathers’ flaws. But it fails to capitalize on the opportunity to learn from their virtues.”
“Make no mistake,” Noem stated bluntly. “This is being done deliberately to discredit America’s founding principles by discrediting the individuals who formed them so that America can be remade into a different political image.”
Watch the speech Noem gave below:
The full text can be read here. At no point did Noem reference Confederate statues, the Civil War, or anything of the sort. But here’s how The Hill initially portrayed her remarks in their headline:
This is how it looked in their RSS feed:
Naturally, because some people couldn’t be bothered to watch the actual speech nor to get their news beyond a tweet (and because the Hill conveniently didn’t provide a video clip), the Usual Suspects jumped on The Hill’s report as supposed proof that Noem made an impassioned speech defending the Confederacy or something:
After criticism, The Hill changed the headline to read “South Dakota governor criticizes removal of statues as effort to ‘discredit’ nation’s principles” and issued the below correction at the bottom of the piece:
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story drew too strong a link between the effort to take down Confederate statues and monuments and Noem’s remarks. The headline and wording has been changed to more accurately reflect her comments.
Except in their “corrected” version, The Hill still couldn’t give up on the phony Confederate angle. Here’s how the corrected part reads:
Noem did not mention Confederate statues directly in her remarks though her comments about “other points in history” strongly appear to reference it.
That is just nothing but straight up editorializing in what is supposed to be an objective news piece. It’s not clear if the writer, Tal Axelrod, inserted the correction in there or someone else did. But either way, it’s still a claim not supported whatsoever by anything Noem said in her speech.
The incorrect tweet received thousands of retweets, as Omri Ceren noted in a screengrab:
But despite changing the headline in their story and adding a correction to the bottom of it, The Hill left the tweet up almost the entire weekend, only deleting it sometime Sunday afternoon.
As with the other reports from journalists at theNew York Times, WaPo, CNN, and others about Trump’s speech, only one conclusion could be drawn from The Hill’s false reporting on Noem’s:
Indeed. And in a presidential election year, no less. The mainstream media’s intentions could not be more visible.
— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —
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