Montana

An idiot GOP Congressional candidate from Montana (now Congressman-elect ... yes, he won) punches out a trained hamster from the media, and predictably, the other trained hamsters at places like MSNBC and CNN blame Donald Trump. After all, the hamsters declare, their voices shaking slightly with a combination of hysteria, outrage, and just a little fear, that it was Trump who had the temerity to call out the media for its blatant pre- and post-election bias, going so far as to label them an "enemy of the American people." Oh my, that can't stand, so the hamsters doubled-down on their bias and tripled-down on their attacks.

First, to the Congressman elect, Greg Gianforte. He's an idiot. His physical attack on a "journalist" cannot and should not be condoned. But as Chris Rock often says, "I don't agree with his actions, but I do understand." Gianforte should apologize with a full mea culpa. He should accept whatever punishment the courts and the House decide upon, and move on.

Now, to the hyperventilating trained hamsters who have conflated the actions of one idiot with the positions taken by Donald Trump. Every President faces an adversarial media, but no president has ever faced anything like the media of 2017. According to a Harvard study, some media outlets report 93 percent of their Trump stories negatively, and that combined with pervasive communication tech that makes those stories available instantaneously (via social media) make this time unique.

For many of the trained hamsters, there is no effort to be objective, no effort to provide context, no effort to cover stories that might reflect badly on Democrats or the past Democratic president, no effort to critique the shrill, often delusional screeches of congressional Democrats as they react to policy proposals offered by the Trump administration, no effort to correct the mischaracterizations of everything from Trump's attempts to control immigration flows to his effort to develop a budget that reduces debt; no effort at all, except to play gotcha in every way possible.

When Donald Trump said that the media was "an enemy of the American people" he was, as he always is, imprecise in his language. An honest, unbiased media is a gift to Democracy, but a dishonest, biased media—a media that exemplifies most or all of the meta-characteristics of fake news—is nothing more than a propaganda arm of one political party. That is a clear threat to our democracy, and Donald Trump was not wrong to label it as such.

So before the trained hamsters hyperventilate even more, it might serve them well to look in the mirror. Through their distorted and self-important lense, they'll see crusading champions for social justice and warriors against the evil Trump. What many of the rest of us see are a group of biased and often dishonest political hacks who truly are an threat to the way in which the American people learn about the events and politics of their time.