GOTCHA – AT 9:36 A.M. ET:   ABC got caught giving a distorted report of a comment by Ari Fleischer, President George W. Bush's first press secretary.  From Newsbusters:

Another example of fake news from the liberal media? ABC late on Tuesday night apologized for deceptively editing former George W. Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer. In a segment from Monday on current press secretary Sean Spicer, Nightline’s Juju Chang featured a quote of Fleischer apparently trashing Spicer's press event: “His briefing made me uncomfortable. It was too truculent, too tough. It looks to me if the ball was dropped on Saturday — ”

On Twitter, Fleischer corrected: “Nightline proves Spicer right about MSM’s dedication to negativity.” Left out of his original comment from Monday? Fleischer's tweeted his full quote: “It looks to me if the ball was dropped on Saturday, Sean recovered it and ran for a 1st down on Monday.”

Fleischer added, “If this is how the press reports, Trump is right to go after them.” He concluded, “When the press distorts someone's quote and twists their words, we all have a problem.”

On Tuesday's show, at 1:05am ET, Chang issued a correction.

COMMENT:  It's about time the press was challenged.  True, journalism is only history's rough first draft, as Ben Bradlee famously remarked, but it should be at least a reasonably accurate draft. 

It's clear many journalists see their job as destroying Trump, who is the anti-Obama.  And Obama was a godlike figure to too many journalists.

The press also seems to be panicking over Trump actually doing things.  How dare he?   And how dare he not seek the approval of the press?

Trump's press strategy is shrewd.  He knows he's more popular than the media, and he'll milk that fact.  He'll also milk the fact that the press got everything wrong about the last election, and seems stuck in the last century.

January 27, 2017