How the media is totally botching the Trump-Kim summit

| 6:30 am EDT June 12, 2018
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This is even worse than I imagined. I’m not talking about the summit between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un, which is precisely as awful as I was expecting. I’m talking about how most (not all) of the mainstream media is covering this summit. I can’t believe they’ve gone back to letting Trump write his own narrative. Did they learn nothing during the election? We have to talk about this.

It’s all too easy to pick on CNN. Like every other cable news network, it has to fill twenty-four hours of airtime each day, even when there is far less than twenty-four hours of legitimate news. Worse, because the sweet spot of CNN’s audience is somewhere in the middle of the political spectrum, it has to fill those hours without ever seriously offending either side. I don’t envy anyone involved with figuring out what to put on air at CNN during a slow news day. But I draw the line at the free airtime it gave last night to Trump and Kim’s collective mascot Dennis Rodman.

If you didn’t see the interview, you’re better off. CNN allowed Rodman to spend twenty minutes reminding us all that he is, in the clinical sense of the term, mentally ill. The poor guy is even further gone now than he was during his most disturbing of late-career NBA days. He was wearing an advertisement for some sort of cryptocurrency scheme. That’s how far gone he is. He spent the whole time babbling incoherently, ranting, lying, crying, you name it. Yet CNN was treating him like he was a foreign dignitary and a political expert.

This is a “summit” between a murderous two-bit dictator, a traitor who is illegally occupying the White House, and their mentally ill mascot. It’s a low point in modern history. Yet the mainstream media is largely (not entirely) treating this like it’s a cross between the Yalta Conference and the royal wedding. The media – particularly cable news – allowed Donald Trump to spend the entire election shoveling excrement at the camera, and it went along with the absurd premise that his deranged antics were somehow a legitimate presidential campaign. Now they’re letting him pretend his phony “summit” with a fellow unhinged monster is some kind of historic achievement in diplomacy. Dennis Rodman should have been the first clue that Trump and Kim have nothing going on here of any merit.