Mike Hosking: Why is the US media so dishonest about Donald Trump?

Donald Trump said last week the greatest threat to America is the media.
I thought that was slightly extravagant.

Russia might be a little bit more threatening, while over the longer term surely China has a world view that might bother many Americans.

ISIS, although diminished, is not vanquished and there are any number of nutters, and what you'd loosely call 'terror groups', out there looking to cause America harm. And that's before you get to the domestic nutters who seem to wreak havoc on the local landscape with their obsessively large collection of weaponry

If you were being slightly facetious, you might indeed argue that the current President himself poses a certain level of threat to large chunks of America. But, although the media claim might have been a bit flamboyant, he nevertheless made an excellent point.

From a media perspective, if the election of Trump has shown nothing else it has exposed glaringly the sheer hypocrisy and dishonesty of so many of the industry's operators.
These are the ones that claimed neutrality, the ones that argued they were fair and balanced and took no sides. Their game was mere reportage of fact, the editorialising was left to others. Those are the ones that have been laid bare.

And our most recent and perhaps best example is the photo of that distressed, some might say distraught child, that has been flashed around the world over and over again as an example of a kid who was snatched from its parents who had entered America illegally.

In that photo was the poster child of all that was wrong with what Trump was doing.
Look at that face, that anguish, that fear, the child who didn't have a clue where its mother and father had been taken and whether they would ever be reunited.

And yet, as it turns out, that child was never taken from its parents at all.

The child was doing what a lot of kids that age do, cry. For who knows what reason, but the reason we do know is it wasn't because they had been separated from their parents.

Time magazine issued a correction to its cover, explaining the crying child had not been separated from its mother at the border.

Now you may not have known this until now, and the reason for that is that this particular revelation exposing the sheer dishonesty of those who so heavily peddled the picture originally, is that the apology and declaration has not been quite as lavishly published as the original accusation.

And the reason for that is it's embarrassing. It exposes yet again the agenda so many of these US organisations have.

But they're not interested in the truth or fact, they're interested in message peddling under the guise of neutrality.

A simple rule should be, you put it on the cover, and when it turns out wrong, you put that on the cover as well. But they never do, they put in it on page 27 where they hope you won't see it.

It has never been a more dangerous and confusing time to believe everything you see and treat it as fact. And the photo of that child in a nutshell shows how dangerous and dishonest it's become.