OPINION
Premium

Kaitlan Collins Will Not Let Shutdown Facts Impede Her Spin, and Public Trust in the Press Hits New Lows

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.

Get access to Brad Slager's "Riffed From the Headlines," a daily VIP feature where he looks to bring accountability to the mainstream media. Use promo code POTUS47 to get 74% off your VIP membership!

Prose & Contradiction – CNN

  • And these are the experts claiming to tell us how it is?

Kaitlan Collins is having a tough go of it this week. On Tuesday, she attempted to lecture Speaker Mike Johnson about the lack of Medicare for illegal aliens in the Democrat proposal, because she had looked at it. Safe to say, Katie, that Speaker Johnson is fully apprised of its contents.

She got into a debate with Scott Jennings over this as well, and tried to slide in her comment that illegals cannot get Obamacare, which no one is even saying. She was handily corrected by him, but there was an even more disqualifying moment.

Jake Tapper was with Hakeem Jeffries, and he actually read the portion of the Democratic plan to the House Minority Leader that contained this disputed spending. Jake needs to send that page over to his co-worker so she can get her talking points straightened out.

Body Checking the Fact-Checkers – CNN

  • We feel we should not need to point out that fact-checking requires you to have the facts.

Speaker Johnson was giving a speech about the government shutdown on Thursday morning, but as CNN was carrying the speech live, the anchor, Pamela Brown, cut away from the speech so that she in the studio could “correct” Johnson on his claim that this was a Democratic Party shutdown.

Technically, illegals cannot get health care, but this is specifically what the Democrats are trying to put in place. But even aside from the details of that point, for her to suggest he is wrong about citing the Democrats for this shutdown is laughable. There has been a clean Continuing Resolution bill with no riders, and it passed the House, but the Senate Democrats have voted against this, causing the shutdown. There is no other way to measure this result.

Johnson, once he was told of this move by the news network, called out CNN directly and delivered the unvarnished facts to show how incorrect they have been.

Race to the Bottom – CNN

  • She sounds “muy” upset that their racist allegations are having no effect.

Another issue that has distracted many in the press has been the ongoing “non-troversy” of President Trump posting the video clip showing Hakeem Jeffries with a sombrero and mustache superimposed. (Yesterday, we showed how ABC News unhelpfully informed us that this was an AI-altered video clip.)

What has the Democrats truly bothered is that they came out with accusations that this was racist, and it has not had the desired effect. (Let’s harken back to when the Democrats were posting numerous “Donald Trump TACO” memes a few months back, and there were no cries of THAT being racist.) Their being bothered by it only sparked a wave of sombrero memes to be created online.

Kaitlan Collins was especially bothered by this, expressing her dismay. "They simply don’t care about the criticism," she reports, woefully. Perhaps this could be a sense of dawning coming over the press?

Reporting on the Mirror – MSNBC

  • When emotional political fervor spills over into the marriage.

Things got testy on “Morning Joe” when Mika Brzezinski went off on one of her emotional tirades, this time about the Democrats losing in the shutdown messaging. She laughably tried to screech about the GOP telling lies and having the biggest media megaphone out there. We mean, please, Mika, be serious.

She then wailed about there being no accountability for these lies leading to violence. Dearie, you work at the network that has ROUTINELY referred to ICE agents as “The Gestapo,” and look at all of the conflicts we are seeing now at ICE facilities.

But then her husband, Joe Scarborough, leaped in and was getting angry that she was misreading this and shouting that Democrats need to fight back against the lies. It sounded like Scar-Joe was being fed up, and he might be sleeping on the couch as a result.

Gilded Reframe – NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO

  • He’s bragging about the result we had been calling for all this time.

October 1 marked the time when NPR and PBS would be officially removed from sucking at the federal teat. NPR fixture Scott Simon popped up to sound somewhat – smug, we have to guess – about the fact that they were still an ongoing concern.

We do not begrudge Simon his little victory dance, of sorts. Seriously, good on them for finding a way to sustain themselves and remain on the air.

But his boasting here is in direct contradiction to the lobbying we had seen for years about the “need” to retain public funding. Children needed their educational content, news deserts would emerge, and, of course, there were the claims that people in remote areas would die because they rely on NPR for emergency broadcasts. (This was exposed as a falsehood during the Texas flash floods, when the NPR affiliate never delivered a single warning as the fatal results took place.)

Reporting on the Mirror – GALLUP

  • Okay, now see – it will keep getting worse because they will not fix the problem.

It is that time again for Gallup to deliver its annual Trust in the Media poll, and the results only continue to get worse for the press.

The general public has lost faith in the media once again, hitting a new historic low for the seventh consecutive year. The most revealing part is that combining the positives still gets beaten out by the individual negative responses.

People saying they have “Not Very Much” faith in the press landed at 36%, while “No Faith At All” came down to 34%. These beat out the combined totals of “A Fair Amount” (20%) and “A Great Deal of Faith” (8%).

This is just woeful…

Legalized Press-titution – VARIOUS OUTLETS

  • Begging for Newsom’s attention with the dignity of a streetwalker.

A group representing a collection of California news outlets, including the Los Angeles Times – The California News Publishers Association – has placed a series of full-page newspaper ads begging Governor Gavin Newsom to spend on advertising space in their periodicals as he is promoting his measure to gerrymander his state further, Proposition 50.

This is, quite literally, the news outlets whoring themselves for a Democrat cause.