The establishment media’s reporting on NSA leaker Reality Winner has been skewed at best, and egregiously biased at worst.
NBC, CBS and ABC’s newscasts largely ignored the myriad tweets from Winner — highlighting her radical left-wing beliefs — with the intention of making her seem apolitical, bolstering the validity of the Trump-Russian meddling narrative.
Winner, a 25-year-old intelligence contractor working at the National Security Agency, allegedly leaked top secret documents to The Intercept. Just over an hour after it was published, Winner was arrested and charged with violating the Espionage Act.
When news broke, so did the evidence of her resentment for President Donald Trump surfacing in past social media posts, with her going so far as to say that “being white is terrorism.” If you thought it stopped there, hold on to your hats.
Winner was more than explicit about her distaste for President Donald Trump in recent tweets, referring to him as an “orange fascist” and a “cunt.” She also tweeted that Trump’s appointment of “Confederate General” Jeff Sessions to the Attorney General post is “racism.”
Sending a tweet in response to an Iranian official, claiming they will only act militarily in “self-defense,” Winner proclaims that if war was initiated by our “Tangerine in Chief” with Iran, Americans will “stand with [Iran]!”
Perhaps her anti-Trump sentiments and rhetoric is so openly blatant and hostile that only the establishment media could miss it. It doesn’t take a politically savvy genius to spot it, much less understand the importance it may have on Winner’s motives to leak top-secret info to hurt the Trump Administration.
Or so you would think.
If the evening news broadcasts on ABC, NBC, or CBS weren’t glossing over her political viewpoints entirely, they were eliding their powerful tendentious tone entirely.
On “CBS Evening News,” Chief White House Correspondent Major Garrett briefly mentions her “sharp criticism” of Trump before cutting into a clip of her stepfather saying she’s a “good person” and does what she can to “make the world a better place.”
Networks deliberately chose to frame the story as either a crackdown on leakers or as yet another strident voice resisting Trump’s presidency. Both support the general conspiracy they’ve consistently floated about Trump’s collusion with Moscow.
No less accurately, though, these networks could have reported her as a blind political ideologue hellbent on damaging an administration with which she simply disagrees, to the point of criminality.
The bias, in other words, is in selection. The worst offender, “ABC World News Tonight,” failed to mention anything about Winner’s anti-Trump social media tirades, only describing her as an “army veteran” (mentioning it 4 times) and a “language specialist.”
ABC’s Justice Correspondent, Pierre Thomas, spoke glowingly of Winner, and the closest he came to discussing her social media accounts was to comment on her Facebook videos “discussing yoga instruction and competing in weightlifting.” Thomas certainly didn’t fail to mention her Air Force commendation medal and that her family describes her as a “patriot.”
In a similar tone, an article on NBC highlighted how “terrified” and “scared” Winner is, framing the story as if “something bad might happen her.” The only tweet they mention on “what is believed to be” her twitter account, is her referring to Trump as an “orange fascist,” hidden at the end of paragraph describing her as a veteran and yoga instructor.
The omission of Winners’ fierce opposition to Donald Trump by the “big three,” reeks of a coordinated effort to frame Winner as a an apolitical, patriotic American doing her duty to expose the Trump administration’s Russian ties. The media’s concern with reporting felicitous narratives as opposed to the truth should be concerning to us all.
Will Ricciardella is co-owner of Unbiased America and a contributor to Occupy Democrats logic, he has degrees in political science and economics from Long Beach State University.
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