Trump's War on Factual News Journalism.

hanimmal said:

Im still watching it, It is just sad how much Trump just talks out of his ass.

But he just says so much stupid shit that so much of it just has to be allowed to not get pushed back on because something more ridiculous comes out of his mouth eventually that moves the interviewer onto a different topic.

Trump: 'We do so much better testing we show more cases'....

Interviewer: "I care about death"

Trump: 'Look at this chart'....

Showing death as a proportion of cases (not population).

So he is touting our death as a proportion to testing being lower than anywhere else.


It is so crazy how before the interviewer can get through that troll, Trump is onto "Look at this other chart"...


I do wish he would have asked @17:50-ish

"Does your intelligence breif get delivered to your desk"?

"How do you receive your Intel Brief"?

"Is there some specific reason it has to be on your desk for you to have seen it, or are you saying you were never given a intel brief with the fact that the Russians are arming the Taliban?"

And then fact check him with the date of the intel briefing book that it was presented to him that had that in it.

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schuylaar said:

it's the shell game..his con doesn't commit to anything ever.

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CunningCanuk said:

Americans love celebrit

It depends on who the dictator is. Americans love celebrity. It trumps (forgive the unintentional pun) all else.

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At least two North Paulding High School students have been suspended after sharing images of a school hallway jammed with their mostly maskless peers, and the principal has warned other students against doing the same.

North Paulding High School in Dallas, Ga., about an hour’s drive from Atlanta, was thrust into the national spotlight this week when pictures and videos surfaced of its crowded interior on the first and second days of its first week back in session. The images, which showed a sea of teens clustered together with no face coverings, raised concerns among online commenters and parents over how the district is handling reopening schools during the novel coronavirus pandemic.

Facing a fierce online backlash, Paulding County Schools Superintendent Brian Otott told parents and guardians in a letter that the images “didn’t look good.” But he argued that they lacked context about the 2,000-plus student school, where masks are a “personal choice.”

Hannah Watters, 15, wore a mask as she captured the inside of her school. On Wednesday, she ended up with a five-day suspension for violating the district’s student code of conduct, BuzzFeed News reported. The rules bar students from using social media during the day or using recording devices without the permission of an administrator.

“Not only did they open, but they have not been safe,” Watters told BuzzFeed News. “Many people are not following CDC guidelines because the county did not make these precautions mandatory.”

The teen, who said she’d never before run afoul of the code of conduct, told the news outlet that she understood she broke the rules. But she also said she viewed her punishment as overly harsh.

Another anonymous student told BuzzFeed News that he, too, faced disciplinary action for the same reasons.

On Wednesday, Principal Gabe Carmona warned students about “consequences” if they copied Watters and the other student, according to audio obtained by CBS 46.

“Anything that’s going on social media that’s negative or alike without permission, photography, that’s video or anything, there will be consequences,” he told students over an intercom announcement.

Carmona and Otott did not respond to requests for comment.

Watters told BuzzFeed that she and her family intend to fight the suspension. Paulding County’s school code of conduct says the penalty for using social media or recording devices can range from in-school suspension to expulsion, according to the degree of the offense.

On the basis of the district’s policy, Watters’s speech probably would have been better protected had she been off school grounds when she posted a social media message about what happened, said Fred Smith Jr., an associate professor of law at Emory University.

“From a rights perspective, the question I would have is whether or not the school has exercised similar discipline for other students who have posted anything during the school day, especially instances of people posting favorable things,” he told The Washington Post on Thursday.

A lack of equal enforcement of the rules could pose a potential First Amendment problem for the school because it could show that the institution applies the rules selectively to speech, he said.

“Schools have a compelling interest in ensuring that there are not substantial disruptions on school grounds,” he said. “As long as that’s what going on, the school’s within its rights.”

Otott, the superintendent, emailed a letter to parents on Thursday that stated the district will be providing all staff with cloth masks and face shields and will try to reduce crowding in school hallways during class changes.

Social distancing and the wearing of masks are “strongly encouraged,” but the district has not required either. It notified parents this month that both would be nearly impossible to enforce on school buses and in classrooms.

Otott said he and his staff will be “reviewing student discipline matters” that happened this week, perhaps referring to Watters and the other student.

“This is a new environment for all of us, but I want to reassure our community that we are addressing the issues that have come to light,” he wrote.

The school district is also gaining more unwanted attention after a video shared on Snapchat allegedly showed a student in a virtual classroom using a racial slur, WXIA-TV reported.

One parent told The Post that her daughter wanted to return to North Paulding High School because she missed the social aspect of her schooling. Michelle Salas said her daughter, Chelsea, has been horrified by how the school has handled reopening and by some of her fellow students’ dismissal of safety concerns.

Salas said her daughter has been bullied by classmates for being vocal about her disappointment in the school’s response to the virus and to Watters. But, she said, that will not prevent her from speaking out about what she sees wrong in the school — even though punitive consequences are possible.

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On the night of Aug. 6, President Trump was flying from Cleveland to New Jersey when he suddenly issued executive orders that would ban the social media video app TikTok and WeChat, China’s largest messaging platform, from doing business in the United States.

Corporate executives, lawyers and other officials found themselves scrambling to react to a policy that’s part geopolitical escalation, part abuse of power — and, given the administration’s track record, one that could be revoked at any time.


But the battle over TikTok and WeChat is part of a now-familiar story. The president or his loyalists threaten to upend some policy, institution or norm they know others will fight to defend. Issuing the challenge can be easy: a speech, a leak, a tweet or two, about immigration rules or education regulations or cutting taxes on the rich. In response, Trump’s opponents must invest substantial time, money and effort to resist the proposal — otherwise, Trump wins by default.

Essentially, the administration has weaponized wasting everyone else’s time.

It’s a struggle between firefighters and a spree arsonist. The firefighters must stamp out every blaze, while the arsonist enjoys pouring accelerant, igniting a spark and sauntering off to start anew with kindling elsewhere. And the gradual exhaustion of the firefighters makes it likelier that they will someday fail to contain the flames.

Over the past several years, Trump and his loyalists have frequently managed to weaken and wear out those they see as enemies by proposing moves that cost the administration little. In these cases, the president often wins either by getting the policy he wants or by making his adversaries — among activists, nonprofits, lawyers, legislators, even business executives — spend disproportionately more effort in response. This phenomenon, as much as the administration’s overt malevolence and incompetence, has helped make the Trump era feel like a never-ending cycle. If it seems as if we are fighting the same battles over and over instead of making progress, that’s because in many cases, we are.


Consider the recent fracas over visas for international students. Last month, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced that foreigners studying at U.S. colleges and universities would lose their visas if their schools suspended in-person instruction because of the pandemic. ICE’s announcement, just weeks before the coronavirus-accelerated start of the fall semester, upset the plans of hundreds of universities and hundreds of thousands of foreign students.

The response was immediate. Dozens of states and universities filed lawsuits to block the rule. Outraged professors pledged to find ways around it. And then, eight days later, the crisis was over; the administration suddenly said that it was dropping the proposal.

By the usual measures of policy effectiveness — whether any laws passed or regulations changed — nothing happened. Yet the costs of “nothing” were immense. For a single university, analyzing the ICE rule’s effects and determining a response could easily tie up tens of administrators for 10- or 12-hour days. Multiplied by the hundreds of universities affected, it’s reasonable to believe that higher education spent tens or hundreds of thousands of staff hours coping with the rule (while schools were already beset by a public health crisis).

Even that is an underestimate: It doesn’t count work done by others, like the state attorneys general or private lawyers representing universities, who labored to prepare lawsuits that required hundreds of pages of filings. And that’s completely overlooking the emotional harm inflicted on international students facing a choice between infection and deportation. If Trump officials had specifically sought to waste universities’ time, they could not have developed a more cost-effective strategy than dashing off a policy proposal that they later abandoned without a fight.

The administration has produced similar effects elsewhere, including in its immigration policy. Earlier this summer, a Supreme Court rulingpreserved the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which protects undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children, despite the administration’s efforts to terminate it.

But the White House has been slow to comply with the court’s judgment, announcing new restrictions on the program and subjecting it to a “comprehensive review.” The groups that won the legal battle now face a choice: take the administration back to court to enforce the law, or give up on protecting DACA beneficiaries.

Once again, the administration has hit upon a low-cost way to make opponents spend time and energy. “If time is a political resource of value,” Syracuse University professor Elizabeth Cohen said, “then anything you can do to force people to spend their time on what you want them to do, not the work they would want to do, is effective.”

The executive orders Trump signed last weekend aimed at mitigating the economic effects of the pandemic are also likely to wind up wasting lots of people’s time. The move upset negotiations at the federal level and piled up work for governors with actual responsibilities at the state level. Even the extension of unemployment benefits, which requires states to provide matching funds, will take months to set up. If, that is, courts or Congress don’t block it first.

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Trump’s haphazard policy shifts are so frequent that people often suggest there must be other motivations. Supposedly the administration announces wild new ideas out of nowhere — such as changing federal standards for shower heads, cutting capital gains taxes or staging the president’s GOP convention speech at the Gettysburg battlefield — to distract from scandals or simply to troll its adversaries.

But the real-life effects go much further. The force of the government is often employed to grind away at the president’s opponents and reshape society, even when his proposals end up going nowhere.

And those most affected are often those who are the most vulnerable. Sophisticates dismiss the administration’s strategy of raising issues that can’t go anywhere, like the president’s repeated musings about eliminating birthright citizenship, as scare tactics. But that underrates how frightening it is to be threatened by an immensely powerful government. The administration said in 2017 that it would add a question to the census asking whether a respondent was a citizen, which could lead to an undercount of certain groups by making them afraid to participate, thus skewing congressional apportionment in favor of Republicans. The Supreme Court turned back this effort in June 2019, but not before “civil servants in the census were forced to consider changing a survey instrument they had already spent years planning, reducing resources available for quality assurance and program integrity,” said Philip Rocco, an assistant professor of political science at Marquette University.

Even after his defeat in court, Trump now says he will preventundocumented immigrants from being counted for congressional apportionment. The new memo means census officials will be forced to waste even more time and effort in planning to implement a policy that will probably be overturned — rather than working to get more responses to the survey.

It’s difficult to quantify these situations, but they seem ubiquitous. “I haven’t looked at a policy area in my research where you have not seen this dynamic,” Rocco says.

Unable to overturn the Affordable Care Act, for instance, the administration has used regulation and administrative slowdowns to weaken the law. So numerous are these attempts that the progressive Center on Budget and Policy Priorities maintains a “Sabotage Watch” blog. Now Trump claims he’ll soon sign an executive order to bar health insurance companies from denying coverage for preexisting conditions — which is already the law under the Affordable Care Act — ensuring that the entire exercise will waste time even if there’s nothing otherwise objectionable in the order.

And the administration has consistently blocked congressional oversight of Cares Act funding for pandemic-related initiatives like the Paycheck Protection Program — forcing lawmakers to spend time establishing their right to investigate such programs rather than, well, investigating them.

All this has led to lawsuits, inquiries and mountains of effort expended to counter Trump’s behavior, with the president and his supporters claiming it’s evidence of “Trump derangement syndrome.” The constant high-stakes fights keep activists, journalists and social media at a boil throughout the cycle of discovering, explaining and processing each new administration initiative. In extreme cases, these cycles can make it seem like a final showdown is at hand.

Yet catharsis never arrives. Some new crisis always comes along to cheat us of even the illusion of finality. Inspector general after inspector general after U.S. attorney is fired, each dismissal somehow displacing the earlier outrages rather than compounding them. Impeachment segues into pandemic. Just cataloguing these battles is exhausting, which may explain why the Trump administration feels uniquely draining.

Of course, sometimes it can be good for a confrontation to end with a whimper, not a bang. No one should complain, for example, that the war scare earlier this year between the United States and Iran, sparked by the U.S. killing of Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani, faded without escalating further. But even that apparent nonevent came with a human toll: the deaths of the 176 passengers and crew of Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752, shot down by Iranian air defenses at the height of the standoff.

If Trump loses in November, one of the hardest things will be figuring out how to calculate the cost — in time, energy and spirit — of all the disasters that never quite came to pass but still wasted our time. Someday, Americans who didn’t live through it all may wonder what the fuss was about. Why were you all so upset about Trump? There were elections, and he lost — it couldn’t have been that bad. And in that happiest world, we will be able to respond only that it took all our strength to make sure nothing big happened.

Nothing, in the end, was the best we could hope for.

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radiant Rudy said:

This f'en Impeached bloated piggy is about to go to market.(after golfing)
Trumps best quality =he is slimming to all others


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Since becoming the overseer of Voice of America in June, Michael Pack has fired subordinates, disbanded advisory boards and declined to renew the visas of foreign journalists who work under him.

Political appointees frequently make personnel changes when they take on a new role. But Pack, who heads the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), has offered a unique justification for his actions: He is rooting out potential spies.

In a memo to staff last month, Pack suggested that his purges are part of an effort to shore up lax personnel standards that have left VOA vulnerable to foreign espionage. His predecessors “ignored common national security protocols and essential government human resources practices,” he wrote. He put it more bluntly last week in an interview with the Federalist, a conservative commentary site: “It’s a great place to put a foreign spy.”

Yet Pack has presented no evidence that anyone at VOA is a foreign intelligence agent. Nor has he explained why VOA and sister agencies such as Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia — media organizations that don’t control sensitive government information — would be an appealing target for penetration by a hostile power.

Now, a segment of staffers who had seethed quietly over Pack’s attempts to reshape the agencies are in open revolt over his unsupported accusations about “spies.” The goals behind the transformations he has pushed for remain murky — although he has said he wants to ensure that VOA “presents the policies of the United States clearly and effectively,” some staffers say this means a realignment with Trump White House messaging. Pack declined interview requests through his spokesman, who also declined to respond to this story on the record.

On Monday, 14 senior journalists at VOA sent a letter to acting director Elez Biberaj protesting Pack’s actions, which they said harmed the agency’s mission and endangered its reporters.

“Mr. Pack has made a thin excuse that his actions are meant to protect national security, but just as was the case with the McCarthy ‘Red Scare,’ which targeted VOA and other government organizations in the mid-1950s, there has not been a single demonstrable case of any individual working for VOA — as the USAGM CEO puts it — ‘posing as a spy,’ ” they wrote.

They argued that the claims throw a blanket of suspicion over their organization, which since World War II has sought to deliver objective news and information to countries where press freedom is limited or nonexistent. They also say it could endanger VOA journalists working abroad: Terrorists and rogue regimes have used bogus accusations of spying as a pretext for the arrest or murder of journalists for decades.

After the letter was first published by NPR, 27 more VOA journalists added their names to it, according to two VOA journalists. The letter seemed to trigger an explosion of tension that had been building inside the Washington-based organization since Pack began making sweeping changes.

How Trump’s obsessions with media and loyalty coalesced in a battle for Voice of America

“So much of this story has evolved around anonymous sources and innuendo,” Joe Bruns, a former acting director of Voice of America in the 1990s, said in an interview. “I admire their courage for putting their names and careers on the line.”

“Mr. Pack has made a thin excuse that his actions are meant to protect national security, but just as was the case with the McCarthy ‘Red Scare,’ which targeted VOA and other government organizations in the mid-1950s, there has not been a single demonstrable case of any individual working for VOA — as the USAGM CEO puts it — ‘posing as a spy,’ ” they wrote.

They argued that the claims throw a blanket of suspicion over their organization, which since World War II has sought to deliver objective news and information to countries where press freedom is limited or nonexistent. They also say it could endanger VOA journalists working abroad: Terrorists and rogue regimes have used bogus accusations of spying as a pretext for the arrest or murder of journalists for decades.

After the letter was first published by NPR, 27 more VOA journalists added their names to it, according to two VOA journalists. The letter seemed to trigger an explosion of tension that had been building inside the Washington-based organization since Pack began making sweeping changes.

How Trump’s obsessions with media and loyalty coalesced in a battle for Voice of America

“So much of this story has evolved around anonymous sources and innuendo,” Joe Bruns, a former acting director of Voice of America in the 1990s, said in an interview. “I admire their courage for putting their names and careers on the line.”

Claver-Carone suggested that the visa renewals had been delayed by the coronavirus pandemic, but added, “We are watching the situation and I hope it gets resolved as soon as possible.”

Segovia followed up by asking whether the White House would be willing to apply some pressure “so that Mr. Michael Pack authorizes these visa extensions, since now the journalistic duty of this group of professionals is being suppressed with no reason provided and with a case-by-case review that has seen no evolution and has not been explained?”

“We value the journalistic duty that you and all VOA journalists do and we will have that conversation,” Claver-Carone concluded.

Segovia emailed that excerpt from the interview to the central news division of the language services on Friday. By that evening, Amy Katz, senior executive producer for VOA, replied to Segovia and the entire Washington news group: “Dear Colleagues, Please DO NOT use this interview on any platforms. If you have already used it, please let us know as soon as possible.”

But the unedited interview was shared via a tweet Saturday morning, which several VOA journalists said was probably due to the fact that weekend tweets are often scheduled in advance. By that afternoon, “the original text and video were altered. All reference to VOA journalists’ situation was deleted,” Segovia explained in his own Twitter thread Saturday.

He responded to Katz’s message by asking why the interview would not be aired, but quickly learned that his username no longer worked for VOA’s email or publishing systems, he explained on Twitter on Saturday afternoon.

The various agencies under the umbrella group of USAGM have been in a state of upheaval ever since the confirmation of Pack, a documentary filmmaker whose nomination was promoted by former White House top adviser Stephen K. Bannon. “He’s my guy, and I pushed him hard,” Bannon told The Washington Post in June.

Pack, who was confirmed after a two-year battle, was in his role for mere days before he stunned five of the media agencies under his control by firing their top officials via a brief email sent after business hours. Two top officials at VOA had resigned days earlier, anticipating the purges.

Board members of one of those media agencies, the Open Technology Fund, recently asked the U.S. Office of Inspector General to investigate Pack’s office for breaching provisions meant to protect the agencies under its control from political interference, Karen Kornbluh, the board chair, told The Post.

An appeals court issued an injunction preventing Pack from dismissing the fund’s board and chief executive. The Open Technology Fund also brought another suit in federal claims court, claiming that Pack’s withholding of funds that Congress had allocated to it violated the Open Technology Fund contract with USAGM.

“It is critically important to maintain the independence of the journalistic organizations, as well as OTF, which must work independently with civil society to ensure unfettered access to the Internet,” Kornbluh said.

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For President Trump and his allies, it was a week spent spreading doctored and misleading videos.

On Aug. 30, the president retweeted footage of a Black man violently pushing a White woman on a subway platform under the caption, “Black Lives Matter/Antifa” — but the man was not affiliated with either group, and the video was shot in October. White House social media director Dan Scavino shared a manipulated video that falsely showed Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden seeming to fall asleep during a television interview, complete with a fake TV headline.

And Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the second-ranking House Republican, released a video splicing together quotes from activist Ady Barkan — who has Lou Gehrig’s disease and uses computer voice assistance — to falsely make it sound as if he had persuaded Biden to defund police departments.

For the president and his top supporters, it was a campaign push brimming with disinformation — disseminating falsehoods and trafficking in obfuscation at a rapid clip, through the use of selectively edited videos, deceptive retweets and false statements.

The slew of false and misleading tweets and videos stood in contrast to the approach taken by Biden, the former vice president, who in 2019 took a pledge promising not to participate in the spread of disinformation over social media, including rejecting the use of “deep fake” videos.

Trump has built a political career around falsehoods, issuing more than 20,000 false or misleading statements during the first three-plus years of his presidency. But many experts said the onslaught of the disinformation efforts by Trump and his team in the late weeks of the campaign make the deception particularly difficult to combat, not to mention dangerous to the country’s democratic institutions.

“When you have this disinformation and it’s introduced to one side of the forest, for example, it can travel so quickly through so many different communities and does so many unintentional things before you can even do a fact check,” said Whitney Phillips, assistant professor of communication and rhetorical studies at Syracuse University. “He’s able to muddy the waters so thoroughly that democracy wilts on the vine.”



By late August, the deceptions came in quick succession. In addition to the misleading subway video, Trump repeated a false claim that just 6 percent of the nation’s death toll in the pandemic was actually caused by the novel coronavirus itself — part of his ongoing effort to portray the virus as less deadly or pervasive than it actually is.

Trump’s campaign shared a short video on Aug. 31 of Biden saying, “You won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America.” But the video failed to include the full context of Biden’s remarks, which he used to argue the opposite — that Americans are experiencing violence and unrest in Trump’s America.

Later that day, in an interview with Fox News’s Laura Ingraham, the president pushed hazy conspiracy theories claiming — again, with no evidence — that Biden is controlled by people in the “dark shadows” and that a plane full of uniformed “thugs” was descending on cities with the intent of creating violence and discord.

During a Tuesday visit to Kenosha, Wis., which has been the site of unrest after the police shooting of a Black man, Trump held a photo op that was muddier than he made it appear. He met with the former owner of Rode’s Camera Shop, which was destroyed in the riots and fires there, while claiming the man was the current owner of the shop. In fact, he is the owner of the building and not the shop.

The photo store’s current owner, meanwhile, had refused to meet with Trump — characterizing the visit as a divisive “circus.”

Later on Thursday, Trump sent tweets seeming to encourage people to vote twice — and prompting Twitter to place a public interest notice on the missives for violating the site’s “civic integrity policy.” The same day, in response to an Atlantic story detailing Trump’s repeated denigration of the military and those who served, Trump falsely claimed on Twitter that he had never called the late senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) a “loser” — despite calling him that publicly in 2015, shortly after announcing his candidacy for president.



In the case of the Barkan video, Scalise eventually updated the clip after a public uproar. In an op-ed in The Washington Post, Barkan warned of the “ominous lessons” he gleaned from the experience: “the ability to use technology not only for good but to mislead and manipulate; the willingness of those with political agendas to resort to such disinformation and propaganda; and the way in which America has cleaved into two separate information universes, with a conservative media ecosystem amplifying falsehoods that then take root.”

Some social media platforms, including Twitter, removed some of the misleading and manipulated content or labeled it as such. The Trump campaign, meanwhile, claimed its out-of-context video saying voters wouldn’t be safe in “Joe Biden’s America” was simply in jest, lambasting “all the triggered journalists who can’t take a joke about their candidate.”

White House spokesman Judd Deere dismissed the idea that the president is actively promoting disinformation, saying that “the American people never have to wonder what the president is thinking or how he feels about a particular topic.”



“The media routinely manipulates the President’s words and takes him totally out of context, but that will never stop him from unapologetically calling out their biased reporting, raising important questions, or suggesting common sense ideas to solve problems,” Deere said in an emailed statement.



“Retweeting is now his plausible deniability strategy. He now says, ‘I didn’t watch the video, I just retweeted,’ ” Phillips said. “If it’s not an active strategy that they sat down to work through, it is still what is communicating the most pernicious elements of his communications strategy in 2020.”

There were several prominent examples of deceptive videos presented at the Republican National Convention last month, when Trump formally accepted his party’s nomination. In one instance, event organizers created a video featuring four tenants of federal housing programs in New York talking about Trump’s record on public housing — but three of the four people interviewed for the video later said they didn’t support Trump and were misled about the purpose of the production.

The president also hosted a naturalization ceremony at the White House that was used in another convention video — but again, several of the participants said they were not aware that their ceremony would be featured prominently at the convention.

Daniel Effron, an associate professor of organizational behavior at the London Business School, said that from a psychological perspective, repeating a false claim is an effective strategy because it makes the falsehood more familiar.

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At a rally in Minnesota, President Trump described an MSNBC anchor hit by a rubber bullet while covering protests after the death of George Floyd in May as “a beautiful sight,” comments quickly condemned by journalists including CNN’s Jake Tapper. “Absolutely heinous,” Tapper said on Twitter Saturday afternoon. “Ali Velshi didn’t deserve to be shot by a rubber bullet...and it’s twisted for anyone, least of all a president, to call it ‘law and order.’”


In his remarks, Mr. Trump mistakenly said of Velshi, “he got hit on the knee with a canister of tear gas,” falsely describing Velshi falling to the ground while being ignored by law enforcement officers—a sight the president said was “beautiful. It’s called law and order.”

In a statement, an MSNBC spokesperson said “freedom of the press is a pillar of our democracy. When the president mocks a journalist for the injury he sustained while putting himself in harm’s way to inform the public, he endangers thousands of other journalists and undermines our freedoms."

Velshi’s MSNBC colleagues Lawrence O’Donnell and Stephanie Ruhle both took to Twitter to condemn the president’s words. “The President of the United States is CHEERING & LYING about our friend & colleague Ali Velshi,” Ruhle said, “calling his injuries incurred while dong his job a beautiful sight.”



Velshi was reporting live in Minneapolis when police began firing rubber bullets and using tear gas against protesters—while seeming to make no effort to avoid targeting journalists. Velshi, who told MSNBC viewers that there had been “no provocation” before police began using force. “The police pulled into this intersection, right into the middle of the crowd.”

Velshi, video shows, was retreating—and warning other journalists to take cover—when he was hit. Despite the president falsely claiming that Velshi fell to the ground wailing “my leg, my leg,” no such thing actually happened. Velshi told viewers he’d been hit and appeared to lean against a parked car.

Former CNN host Piers Morgan joined those condemning the president’s words, calling it “disgusting” to celebrate the targeting of a journalist:

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