Reporter Kurt Eichenwald Who Has Held Trump's Feet To The Fire Addresses "The Way Forward"

Kurt Eichenwald

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Eichenwald

Kurt Eichenwald Says The First Thing Reporters Need To Do Is "Face Reality" With Regard To Trump

Kurt Eichenwald appeared on MSNBC Saturday.  Host Jonathan Capehart asked him about Trump's latest press-conference-by-tweet, wherein Trump complained that son Eric was being abused by not being able to raise money for "kids he loves," via the Trump foundation.

"My wonderful son, Eric, will no longer be allowed to raise money for children with cancer because of a possible conflict of interests. Isn't this a ridiculous shame?  He loves these kids, has raised millions of dollars for them and now must stop. Wrong answer!"

Eichenwald responded:

“The first thing we need to do is face reality,” Eichenwald replied. “If Eric Trump is so upset, write a check. We’ve got to stop acting like everything that happens to this guy when they complain about how difficult it is, if they want to give to charity, give to charity. They can write the money themselves, they don’t need to raise it from us.”

“Secondly, and this is the most important, we have a president-elect who has been treated completely differently from anybody else,” he continued. “The press has unfortunately gotten into this thing where they’re afraid of propaganda outlets like Fox News coming in and calling them biased. There is no bias here. We have got to grow a backbone. We have got to demand press conferences. We have got to stop covering his tweets like they’re news.”

“This man has some very serious questions to answer,” Eichenwald said. “We’re getting to the point we should start to wonder, is the problem he can’t answer? That he doesn’t have the intelligence to answer? That he’s afraid to answer? We have to bear down on him and let the American public know that this is not normal. When the Foxes of the world object to acting like a normal reporter as being biased we should just point them out and say, they’re lying, just ignore them.”

Eichenwald is an ardent critic of Fox News and has been for some time and with ample justification.  Eichenwald has kept a running record of inaccuracies and outright falsehoods, some of which he kept in a thick three ring binder labeled in large blue letters, "Tucker Carlson Falsehoods," and offered to give the book to Tucker Carlson, with the proviso that he publish the documentation on the Fox News website.  Carlson made no reply but proceeded to insult Eichenwald, demanding to know how Newsweek could hire him as a reporter. In Carlson's "mind" Eichenwald is a mere rabble rouser -- projection? The particular interview where this exchange took place was the one that prompted a disgruntled right wing viewer to lash out at Eichenwald by sending him a strobing gif via his twitter account, which triggered an epileptic seizure in Eichenwald on December 16th.

That awful episode notwithstanding, Eichenwald is back in the saddle.  He is right, we do need to bear down on Trump and hold him strictly accountable.  As both Kurt Eichenwald and columnist Charles Blow of the New York Times have said repeatedly, we must never normalize Trump.  We are living in grossly abnormal times and media coverage as usual will not cut it. There is no "equivalency" to report in a "balanced" fashion.  Fox and Breitbart will continue to spin lies, and they would spin straw and tell you it was really gold, if they could manage it; that much is certain.  Real journalists need to stop worrying about tweets and presidential access and concentrate instead on reporting cold hard facts. That is the only way that we will get through a Trump regime without Orwellian revisionist history and doublespeak overwhelming us. George Orwell said, "In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."  It's time for reporters to become revolutionaries.