Maggie Haberman and Michael S. Schmidt are political reporters for the New York Times. They are two of the best in the business. In March, they had a report saying that President Trump was thinking about shaking up his legal team. They said, in particular, that Trump was thinking about adding Emmet T. Flood, a Clinton impeachment lawyer.
Trump went on the attack, saying, “The Failing New York Times purposely wrote a false story stating that I am unhappy with my legal team on the Russia case and am going to add another lawyer to help out. Wrong.” He further said, “The writer of the story, Maggie Haberman, a Hillary flunky, knows nothing about me and is not given access.”
Of course, the story was perfectly true. Trump has shaken up his legal team and brought in Counselor Flood.
I think people should remember that, next time the president cries “Fake News!”
In April, Trump again went after Haberman, saying, “The New York Times and a third rate reporter named Maggie Haberman, known as a Crooked H flunkie who I don’t speak to and have nothing to do with, are going out of their way to destroy Michael Cohen and his relationship with me in the hope that he will ‘flip.’”
By all credible accounts, Trump speaks with Haberman frequently. (Her reports reflect this.) And she is, in fact, one of the leading Trumpologists in the country. As such, she surely saw this tweet coming from a mile away.
In our April 16 issue, I had a piece about RFE/RL (whose initials stand for Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty). I spoke with Thomas Kent, the veteran Associated Press reporter and editor who is now the president of RFE/RL. We were talking about the incessant propaganda — the stream of lies — that comes out of the Kremlin. Kent uses the term “false news,” rather than “fake news.” When people say “fake news,” they often mean, not fake news, but news that is unwelcome to them.
Jeff Gedmin, a past president of RFE/RL, speaks of “real fake news” — news that is truly false. “Real fake news” is a funny term, maybe, but easy to understand.
On the subject of RFE/RL, here is a sad report, out of Kabul:
Afghanistan’s slain journalists were remembered on World Press Freedom Day — May 3 — just three days after the deadliest attack on the country’s media since the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001.
Ten journalists were killed on April 30 — nine by an Islamic State (IS) suicide bomber in Kabul and another in the eastern province of Khost — in what all appeared to have been targeted attacks.
The attacks killed two RFE/RL journalists and an RFE/RL trainee, an AFP photographer, a BBC reporter, and journalists from Afghanistan’s Tolo News, 1TV, and Mashal TV.
Omar Waraich, Amnesty International’s deputy director for South Asia, said on May 3 that Afghanistan’s journalists are “among the bravest in the world.”
You’re damn right. I can hardly fathom the courage they have, to bring real news to people, who sorely need it.