This reporting presents it as a debate with reasoning on both sides, rather than a brazen act with no defence supplied. It's not good journalism to legitimise a position that didn't even attempt to legitimise itself.
Matthew Gertz, a senior fellow at Media Matters, summarises its mechanisms and intent quite succinctly: “This is the path that Viktor Orbán took in Hungary, where you use the power of the state to ensure that the media is compliant, that outlets are either curbed and become much less willing to be critical, or they are sold to owners who will make that happen."
Counter to what? Most news sources are owned by people who support this administration’s positions, and are glad they don’t have to do this whole charade of pretending to care about the truth or normal people.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/21/us/politics/trump-fake-vi...
And I'm including the "leftists" who decided a second Trump term was preferable to the "status quo" under Kamala Harris, or that it didn't matter because "both parties were the same." There's a special circle of Hell reserved for that lot.
What should I expect from the same administration that also altered the (tiny fraction of) Epstein files before releasing them.
Independent of your views on immigration, or law and order, or anything. Juvenile shit like this does absolutely nothing to advance any policy goals.
Even worse, why should you average normie trust any image that comes out from the White House? If there's a serious national security issue, why are we going to trust a group of people who are willing to doctor a photo for such stupid ends?
It is a politics of meanness.
or trust that whatever is released by the DOJ on the Epstein files is genuine
You should stop appealing to some kinds of higher principles that are provably inexistant among Trump supporters. This kind of juvenile shit is why they like him in the first place. Anyone still siding with them deserves only scorn and disgust.
Their voters wanted exactly that tho. Although they did not wanted harm for themselves, conservatives and republicans actively wanted this kind of "owning the libs" and insulting "the libs".
This part is literally what the vote was about.
This is precisely the thing they voted for.
Why don't more people feel insulted when lied to?
"we only want curious conversation here."
"if it would be covered on tv it's probably off topic."
You know the drill.
That's some post-constitutional anti-democracy bullsh*t right there that should have zero tolerance because that means everything else is likely a lie.
It's like a virus since he came down the golden escalator, first every single thing he said was a lie or wild exaggeration, and then he recruited exclusively only people around him to do the same.
There's good reason the highest power positions in the government are HIS PERSONAL LAWYERS with legal obligation first to him beyond anything else.
Please don’t misread: I am genuinely curious how I one may have read this another way and how that could have been helped with rewording.
1. "Defends" suggests some level of explanation and justification; the White House did not present any here.
2. "AI image showing arrested woman" could mean a fully-generated image of a woman, rather than editing an image of an existing person under law enforcement control to disguise the actual facts. The first one would be bizarre, the second one is much more problematic.
Released and back with family in Venez.
Wait, what?
Trump did not have enough pay the money from his rape case. Now a year later through bribes and making Americans poorer with tariffs he personally has earned over a billion dollars. Greenland conquering gave him a couple extra weeks to break the law and only release the 1 percent of photos from the Epstein files that had Clinton in them.
"The government... the American government - they're sneaky, they're very deceitful, they're liars, they're cheats, they're rip-offs. I mean, the American government is one-- is one systematic government that... that nobody can trust. I don't trust them myself"
Say it isn't so . . .
