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Saturday, May 27, 2017

The Insidious Media Methods

This morning, I got another demonstration of just how the mainstream media works it attack on President Trump.  I was talking to a person with some degree of insight when it comes to news stories, and he told me that President Trump's lawyers had told the President to stop tweeting.  I had seen the headline that announced that advice being given by Trump's lawyer but ignored it as bogus.  Here, however, was someone who had been taken in by a phony story designed to make Trump look like he is out of control and needs to be reined in by his lawyers.

Let's explore this story a bit.  The lawyers who supposedly gave President Trump this advice are the lawyers he hired to handle the investigation by Robert Mueller.  These are outside lawyers, not government employees.  The announcement of their hiring was just made a few days ago.

One thing is certain about any meetings or phone calls between President Trump and these lawyers:  no one else was in the room.  These are experienced high-powered lawyers who would never conduct confidential attorney/client communications with anyone else able the hear what was being said.  The presence of anyone else would prevent the assertion of attorney/client privilege.  It would open these conversations up to inquiry by investigators.  It would, in other words, be complete malpractice by the lawyers.  It's the kind of mistake that even a first year lawyer would not make, and these lawyers surely would not let it happen.  No one but the President and his lawyers was in the room.

So where did the information for the story come from?  It's safe to assume that President Trump did not leak it.  It's also a safe bet that the lawyers didn't leak it either.  Indeed, if it turned out that these lawyers were leaking advice they gave to their client, the President, they would be disbarred at a minimum. For a lawyer, it would be a cardinal sin.

Putting that together, we find that the only people in the room where the advice was supposedly given were the President and his lawyers, and it is extremely unlikely that any of them were the source of the information.  In other words, the story is just more Fake News.

My point is not that the media is filled with Fake News.  That is Old News.  My point, rather, is that seemingly intelligent people see a headline which reports a phony point, that sinks into their consciousness and then they repeat it as if it were true.

It's important to keep this process in mind when you hear people tell you about what is happening.  You cannot just accept what the media says; it's often false.  You also cannot accept what others tell you because they too may have been fooled by a phony story -- just like my friend.

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