WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY STEPHANIE GRISHAM AND PRINCIPAL DEPUTY PRESS SECRETARY HOGAN GIDLEY: “THE WASHINGTON POST’S LOST SUMMER”

Office of the Press Secretary FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE September 6, 2019 WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY STEPHANIE GRISHAM AND PRINCIPAL DEPUTY PRESS SECRETARY HOGAN GIDLEY: “THE WASHINGTON POST’S LOST SUMMER” “As Congress prepares to return from its six-week-long recess, Americans deserve to know that Trump has been hard at work this summer, and every day since he took office, keeping his promises to the American people.”   The Washington Post’s lost summer By Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham and Principal Deputy Press Secretary Hogan Gidley Washington Examiner September 5, 2019 … [A]s the summer came to a close, the Post set out to ”report” the president’s summer accomplishments, but reporting is not what the Post does. Two of its writers published an opinion article they claimed was news but that instead pushed their own personal political narrative that President Trump had a “lost summer” of squandered opportunities and few accomplishments. The truth is, Trump racked up many well-documented victories that directly benefited the American people at home and abroad. When the Post asked, the White House proudly provided it with a detailed list of the administration’s 26 most important successes of the summer. Of those 26 accomplishments, the Post chose to publish just four, which it buried under 11 paragraphs of editorialized critique. Media bias comes in two forms. It plays a role in deciding what news is, and is not, covered, and also in deciding how that news is covered. In this instance, the Post's “reporters” are guilty of both. … The Post could have written about the president’s directive to ease all federal student loan debt for disabled veterans. They didn’t. They could have written about the first time in history a sitting United States president walked across the DMZ into North Korea. Not a chance. They could have written about the first stage of the president’s historic trade deal with Japan, which will give our American farmers even more access to one of the largest and most promising markets. Of course not. The president even fixed dangerous immigration loopholes to increase border security and make American communities safer, but these two reporters would not deviate from their preset narrative and write about that either. … It is impossible to trust the media when the executive director of the New York Times is caught on tape outlining plans to transition its coverage from the Russian hoax to another false narrative about Trump and racism. Or when TV networks accused the president of “manufacturing a crisis” at our southern border, only to later flip-flop and blame him for Congress’ refusal to fix that very crisis. … The most egregious and dangerous forms of this bias thrived this summer at media outlets like the Washington Post, which routinely masquerade opinion as news. Heading into the fall, the Post and others should at the very least pledge to sequester such breathless partisanship, rampant editorializing, and obvious bias to their opinion pages. Read the full op-ed here.