The moaning from the national media about the Trump administration inciting violence against reporters has always been a lie, and now everyone knows.
April Ryan, the White House reporter and CNN contributor, took an innocuous comment by Sarah Sanders on Thursday and said she interpreted it to be a violent threat.
To demonstrate how seriously she took it, she then went on Twitter to joke with Democratic former Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake about actually fighting Sanders.
Lol stop. Bmore in the house I know you have my back. That you don’t know me stuff begins fist fights. She needs to know what she is saying. I am not the one
— AprilDRyan (@AprilDRyan) May 3, 2018
That is what I am talking about! Take off that pretty ring to fornthe street fight. Lol
— AprilDRyan (@AprilDRyan) May 3, 2018
Here’s what Sanders said that had Ryan watching her back: “Well, with all due respect, you actually don’t know much about me in terms of what I feel and what I don’t.”
That’s pretty innocuous, but Ryan doubled-down on Friday, claiming the White House’s words “incite death threats on me and others and then they say things that typically start street fights. And I am the one with the issue please!”
In an interview on CNN, Ryan claimed Sanders implied something she never said.
“For Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the presidential spokesperson, the mouthpiece for the President of the United States, to say, ‘You don’t know me,’ in certain quarters in this nation, that starts a physical fight,” she said.
It’s unclear what “quarters in this nation” are so on edge that “You don’t know me” carries the same connotation as “watch your back,” but I suspect it doesn’t include the White House briefing room.
Ryan and others in the media regularly accuse President Trump of encouraging his supporters to attack reporters. They point to a cartoon Trump promoted on Twitter that showed a train hitting a CNN logo and an altered video clip he shared, also on Twitter, that showed him tackling another CNN logo.
They also say Trump’s broadsides against the press as “dishonest” (see here) and “unfair” (see here, here, and here) are whipping up anger against journalists.
“My concern is that a journalist is going to be hurt one of these days,” CNN’s Jim Acosta told Variety. “Somebody is going to get hurt. And at that point, you know, the White House, the president of the United States, they’re going to have to take a hard look in the mirror and ask themselves whether they played a role in this, whether they created this toxic environment that resulted in a journalist getting hurt.”
To date, however, there has not been a single act of violence against a reporter that can be directly traced to Trump calling the media “fake news” or Sanders, who has complained about the “tone” some reporters take in their questions.
And if there is one, why would the White House bear any responsibility?
CNN fed the “hands up, don’t shoot” lie in December 2014 when a panel of four of the network’s personalities held up their hands on set and displayed a sign that said, “I can’t breathe.”
In the summer of 2016, five cops were shot dead and nine others were injured at a march protesting excessive force by police against unarmed blacks. The gunman went on the firing spree because he “wanted to kill white people, especially white officers,” according to the Dallas police chief.
Was CNN at all responsible for the “toxic environment” that resulted in police getting killed? No.
There is no violent threat against journalists, at least as far as the White House is concerned.
Ryan proved it.
