This week’s Liberal Mainstream Scream features the former editor of Newsweek drawing a connection between the anti-Kennedy hate before JFK was assassinated and President Trump’s criticism of the press.
Jon Meacham suggested on MSNBC that Trump’s attacks on the media could lead to murder, claiming instances of right wing hostility were part of “an inevitable progression.”
[Related: Trump says only ‘fake news,’ not all media, are ‘enemy of the people’]
His comments came after MSNBC host Brian Williams on Friday played clips of Trump trashing the media and relayed how New York Times columnist Bret Stephens warned that “we are approaching a day when blood on the newsroom floor will be blood on the president’s hands” — an assessment of which Williams declared: “I don’t think that’s an overstatement.
Joh Meacham, on the August 3 The 11th Hour on MSNBC:
“And one of the things about history is when we look back, we often see things in an inevitable progression. When we look back at Dallas, 1963, we remember that the Johnsons were jostled, people spit at Lady Bird from the John Birch Society, from the right in Texas. We see that Adlai Stevenson, then the ambassador to the United Nations was attacked with placards at a rally. We can see in retrospect all leading up to the tragedy of Dealey Plaza. I fear, and I pray that I’m wrong, that you could be playing the tape you just played a moment ago, the sequence, when in fact something terrible happens. And words have consequences. And words from the very top have the most far reaching consequences.”
Media Research Center Vice President of Research Brent Baker explains our weekly pick: “Meacham has reached a new low in journalistic absurdity, going to an assassination in order to blame President Trump for a potential future murder. But Meacham put his infatuation with finding an historic analogy with which to discredit Trump ahead of basic facts. Despite the ‘fake news’ which animated coverage at the time, a left wing communist, not anyone tied to right wingers in Dallas, assassinated JFK.”
Rating: Five out of five screams.
