I was listening to a YouTube video of Chuck Todd on Meet The Press interviewing Joel Pollak, and decided to make a meme out his excellent metaphor Jenga, in describing how the media’s entire concocted story on Trump vis-a-vis the Russians collapsed. I quickly created the hashtag of #JengaJournalism and tweeted it out. Pollack liked it, re-tweeted it, and now has an entire post with the meme in the headline. 🙂
Blue State Blues: Donald Trump Exposes Media’s Jenga Journalism
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For months, the mainstream media played a game of “Jenga journalism,” building a tower of accusations against Donald Trump, using flimsy, speculative claims of Russian collusion.
None of the different pieces of the conspiracy theory could hold up on their own, but journalists — and the Hillary Clinton campaign — treated the pile of Russia innuendo like a real monument. But then Trump made the move that forced them to tug at the foundations of their own illusion, and it crashed.
@joelpollak comes up with amazing new meme in @chucktodd interview #JengaJournalism https://t.co/xtk2Ka3wYb
— TundraTabloids (@TundraTabloids) March 17, 2017
In the past several days, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former Acting Director of the Central Intelligence Agency Mike Morell have both stated publicly that there is no evidence that the Trump campaign cooperated with Russia. But they held their tongues for months as the false accusations mounted against Trump. It was only after the president tweeted that former President Barack Obama had wiretapped him that they found the courage to tell the truth.
Trump based his claim on the mainstream media’s own reporting — a point made by conservative talk radio host Mark Levin and then later at Breitbart News. The New York Times, the BBC, and others had reported that the Obama administration had carried out surveillance on people close to Trump. Furthermore, the Times reported that the previous administration relaxed the rules of the National Security Agency to disseminate the results of that surveillance, some of which was evidently leaked.
The media latched onto Trump’s claim that Obama had tapped his “phones,” as if that proved Trump was lying. But no one could dispute any of the core elements of Trump’s claims — until this past Thursday, when the Senate Intelligence Committee issued a short bipartisan statement: “Based on the information available to us, we see no indications that Trump Tower was the subject of surveillance by any element of the United States government either before or after Election Day 2016.”
