After recent botched scoops, media hype hits new lows | Opinion

The anti-Trump media keeps marching gleefully from one inaccurate news story to the next, with no apparent concern for the damage done by their irresponsible reporting.

The media thoroughly embarrassed themselves recently with not one, but two misleading news stories that garnered national attention.

It started last Thursday with the wall-to-wall coverage of Buzzfeed’s supposedly earth-shattering report that claimed President Trump directed his former attorney, Michael Cohen, to lie to Congress.

While some principled journalists were skeptical after BuzzFeed published its exclusive late Thursday, most mainstream media outlets charged in head-on — simply using the phrase “if true” to avoid having to fact-check the damning allegation.

For example, CNN and MSNBC couldn’t confirm BuzzFeed’s unverified report, but that didn’t stop those networks from using it to gush over impeachment nearly 200 times before the article was discredited by an unprecedented statement from the office of Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

Undeterred by this spectacular humiliation, the media went right back to churning out more fake news the very next day — this time targeting teenage students from Covington Catholic High School in Kentucky. Several of the students were wearing MAGA hats (no doubt their greatest sin in the media’s eyes), and they were caught up in a confrontation with an American Indian and a radical group of provocateurs at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington.

Incomplete video footage of the incident quickly went viral. Liberal politicians and journalists accused the students of racism — and some even called for violent retaliation against the teenagers.

New Republic’s Jeet Heer, for instance, wrote in a now-deleted tweet that the Trump-supporting students' actions were “racist,” and CNN’s Bakari Sellers later deleted a tweet suggesting the kids should be “punched in the face.”

In another since-deleted tweet, CNN’s Ana Navarro referred to the teens’ parents with an expletive and said they had taught their children “bigotry” and “racism.”

Kentucky Democrat Rep. John Yarmuth even sought to place blame on President Trump, saying, “The conduct we saw in this video is beyond appalling, but it didn’t happen in a vacuum. This is a direct result of the racist hatred displayed daily by the president of the United States who, sadly, some mistake for a role model.”

Once again, however, it turned out that members of the media had allowed their anti-Trump fervor to prevent them from performing basic journalistic due diligence.

Interviews with participants and additional video footage soon revealed that the students were shouting “school spirit” chants to drown out vile, racially-charged taunts from a group of protesters, the Black Hebrew Israelites. Then, the supposedly victimized American Indian activist Nathan Phillips deliberately inserted himself between the two groups, setting the stage for the brief video clip that elicited such vitriol from the liberal media.

Many of the so-called journalists who rushed to judgment have apologized, but the damage has already been done.

Parents and students received death threats, and their school was forced to cancel classes due to “threats of violence and the possibility of large crowds.”

It’s bad enough when partisan journalists use made-up news as a cudgel to attack President Trump, but at least he’s a public figure. Their shameful, knee-jerk reactions to the Covington Catholic High School made teenagers pawns in their crusade against the president.

President Trump was absolutely right to cite incidents such as these to demonstrate that some members of the media are “the enemy of the people,” and this past week, the media proved it.

Newt Gingrich, a Republican, served as House speaker from 1995 to 1999 and ran as a presidential candidate in 2012.