Former White House press secretary Sean Spicer told Breitbart News Daily on SiriusXM 125 on Wednesday that former CBS News 60 Minutes correspondent Lara Logan is correct to call out bias across the establishment media.
After hearing during the interview a clip of a recent Logan interview in which she bashed the media establishment for leftist bias and told people to read Breitbart News to get the full story, Spicer said he agreed and explained why Logan was correct.
“Look, here’s the thing: there’s a couple things I want to get at because this is important, what she said,” Spicer said of Logan’s comments.
“Number one, the pushback from most of the folks in the mainstream media that I saw yesterday is no president is going to like their coverage. That is such a false argument. Number one, when you look at the coverage–and there’s been at least three or four studies from everything from Harvard to Pew to Media Research Center, spanning the gamut, all coming to the same conclusion that a preponderance of the coverage–somewhere between 85 and 95 percent of the coverage of this president–is negative. Now, that’s ridiculous.”
Spicer went on to say, “If we look at just basic facts about the economy and foreign policy, you can say that 40 or 50 percent should be negative to make it tough. But when it’s 95, that doesn’t jive with reality. Most presidents have been in the 55 to 60 percent range, which is still tough, but going to 90, 95, is ridiculous. The idea these folks in the media, their idea is that, well, no one is going to like their coverage. It is a false argument. That is just a flat-out false argument.”
“What Lara is getting to,” the former press secretary continued, “which is so critical if you think about it, they always talk about criticizing the media being a problem, but they don’t have a problem when they lash out at Breitbart and Fox News. They call them ‘conservative media.’ But they never call MSNBC ‘liberal media.’ They never call the Huffington Post ‘liberal media.’ Everybody that doesn’t go into the group mind meld that they’re pushing is a bad thing. Her point is well-taken. Think about this for a second: New York Times, Washington Post, NBC, ABC, CNN, MSNBC are where you get the majority of Americans; just those outlets are all on the left. But then, you start going down even further, and you’ve got Vox and Vice and The Daily Beast, and then you’ve got the late night guys, Trevor Noah, Bill Maher, Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, Samantha Bee. All of those places are all pushing the same anti-conservative, anti-Donald Trump narrative. No one seems to care in media that it’s so juxtaposed against one person. That’s not being tough; that’s just a reality. The funny thing is they lash out at Fox, they lash out at Breitbart because they don’t like the fact that there is now another outlet, and they can’t continue to dominate it. When I grew up, there were three stations–ABC, NBC, and CBS–and you had to get up and read your morning paper every morning wherever you lived because that was it. There was no Internet. Then talk radio came out and offered people an alternative, and then the Internet, and the media, I don’t think, [can’t] stand the fact that the stranglehold that they’ve had over what the American people have read, seen, and heard is now undercut by outlets like Breitbart and Fox and so many others with the proliferation of other people and outlets on the Internet.”
Spicer’s book, The Briefing: Politics, the Press, and the President, is available on his website.
Spicer continued in the interview by noting that despite all the media bias against him, President Trump has succeeded in nearly every respect when it comes to implementing economic policies that benefit all Americans.
“They’ll never give him credit because they were so invested, I think, in a Hillary Clinton campaign, that they don’t want him to get a second term now,” Spicer said of the media.
Spicer said the reason Trump is succeeding as president is because he is following through on his campaign promises–going down the checklist of things he promised during the 2016 campaign and accomplishing them one by one.
“Most politicians say a ton of stuff on the campaign trail to get elected, and then once they get elected, they tell you why they can’t do what they said they were going to do,” Spicer said. “Trump has done almost everything that he said he was going to do, whether it’s renegotiating NAFTA or whether it’s North Korea or helping out veterans, passing tax cuts, moving the embassy to Jerusalem, pulling out of Paris–all of the things that he said he was going to do. The funny thing about it is establishment Washington was just so used to politicians lying, that they pretty much didn’t believe him, and then when he actually started to do what he said he was going to do, they kind of freaked out on him. ‘What do you mean you’re going to pull out of Paris?’ Well, ‘I said it 50 times I was going to do it on the campaign trail. Why should it be a surprise?’ But I think some of these folks are so surprised–I mean, how many presidents, going back at least through Clinton, have said, ‘I’m going to move the embassy to Jerusalem’? Everyone says, ‘Oh, yeah, yeah, I get it. You have to say that to appease the folks that are pro-Israel, that believe in this, even the evangelical Christians who have supported this move for a long time, but then you always have to find a way to say for national security reasons you have to sign the waiver every six months.’ Trump did it once and then said, ‘Okay, enough is enough. I promised to do this. I’m going to make it happen.’ Everybody acted shocked. The irony of the narrative versus the reality with Trump is that he’s done pretty much exactly what he said he was going to do on the campaign trail.”
Spicer also explained why he backs Richard Grenell, the U.S. ambassador to Germany, being named the next United Nations ambassador in the wake of former State Department spokeswoman and former Fox News host Heather Nauert withdrawing from the nomination.
“Rick Grenell, I think, has been the definition of an accomplished ambassador. He has gone over there and has fought tooth and nail to implement the president’s agenda and to re-assert America’s policy into the debate not just in Germany, but throughout Europe,” Spicer said. “Rick has stood head and shoulders above so many in the diplomatic corps because he’s not afraid to fight. He’s not afraid to get the job done. He’s not there to go to parties and make pleasantries and niceties; he’s there to fight for the agenda that the American people elected the president for.”
LISTEN TO FORMER WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY SEAN SPICER ON BREITBART NEWS DAILY:
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