Vincent J. Curtis
30 Jan 2017
As the news media spins itself into full opposition mode,
even Fox News is getting into the
act.
One of the lessons of the campaign was how much Trump knows
and what Trump knows. Another lesson is
that one needs to listen very carefully to the question actually being asked
and answered by Trump. Trump is mentally
very quick and can follow the twists and turns to questioning that half-clever
media types like Chris Matthews throw quickly at him. Not listening carefully to the question Trump
is actually answering has caused the media to caught misleading the public,
much to Trump’s benefit.
On Fox News Sunday
yesterday, it was Chris Wallace’s turn to learn a lesson from the Trump
administration, in his case from the lovely and talented Kelly Anne Conway.
Wallace tried to catch Trump in declaring something
false. He employed the clip below
(courtesy of Fox News) to trip up Ms. Conway:
“TRUMP: If you are a Muslim, you could come in.
But if you are a Christian, it was almost impossible. I thought it
was very, very unfair. So, we are going to help them.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
WALLACE: First,
that's not true. I want you to take a look at this. As you can see
here, in 2016, almost as many Christian refugees were admitted as Muslims.
And second, President Trump is barring people from seven countries, the
ones you can see on the map, but not included on the list are Saudi Arabia, and
Egypt, and Afghanistan, and Pakistan. And Saudi Arabia is where most of
the 9/11 hijackers came from.
Why are they not on the
list?
CONWAY: This was the
seven countries was offered by President Obama and his administration. In
2015 – “
For the first part, the figures Wallace quoted were as
follows:
Christians: 37,521
Muslims: 38,901. FY
2016.
If it were me, I would have told Wallace that he needed to
check the numbers because they didn’t sound right. Luckily, David French of National Review does
have the figures, and he reported on NRO
as follows:
“Sadly, during the Obama administration it seems that
Christians and other minorities may well have ended up in the back of the line.
For example, when Obama dramatically expanded Syrian refugee admissions in
2016, few Christians made the cut: The Obama administration has resettled
13,210 Syrian refugees into the United States since the beginning of 2016 — an
increase of 675 percent over the same 10-month period in 2015. Of those, 13,100
(99.1 percent) are Muslims — 12,966 Sunnis, 24 Shi’a, and 110 other Muslims —
and 77 (0.5 percent) are Christians. Another 24 (0.18 percent) are Yazidis. As
a point of reference, in 2015 Christians represented roughly 10 percent of
Syria’s population. Perhaps there’s an innocent explanation for the disparity.”
The figures Wallace quoted were refugee claims from all over
the world for Fiscal Year 2016, which included places like Christian South
Sudan. In respect of Syria and Syrian
refugees, Trump was absolutely right and the problem of the treatment of
Christians in Syria and Iraq is what is of concern to Christian Churches in the
Western World. Wallace’s figures were
irrelevant to the matter at issue.
Perhaps an overzealous or inattentive researcher put Wallace in the
wrong, but Wallace was wrong.
The second part of the question, of why Saudi Arabia, Egypt,
Afghanistan weren’t on the list, seems to me to be a little hasty and false in
tone. This is just Trump’s first
week. As Conway pointed out, Trump is
merely repeating what the deity Obama Himself did in 2011, in respect of
countries that had been named either by the Congress or by the deity as
terrorist states. So the gales of
concern seen on the streets yesterday was brain-dead anti-Trump partisanship
running wild. Next week, after his
Secretary of State is confirmed, a more refined and nuanced policy can be put
into place, and after a top to bottom review of refugee policy has been completed, after 90 or 120 days. In the
meantime, the U.S. holds where it is.
This isn’t unreasonable.
Wallace also raised the issue of Steve Bannon’s telling the
media that they ought to be embarrassed and should shut up and listen for a
while. Wallace asked Conway if she
understood how offensive Bannon was.
Note the formulation, “do you
understand…”
When I was touring GITMO on behalf of the Buffalo News in 2008, I was paired with
a TV news team from Portugal. Normally,
print media were not paired with TV media because of differences in style, but that’s
what happened on this occasion. Whenever
we got to speak to responsible authorities, the TV interviewer would interrupt
the opening remarks of that person with a series of argumentative questions. Finally, I got tired of it and told the TV
crew to shut up and let the person complete their opening remarks, then ask
questions. I turned to our media-minder
and unloaded this military nugget: “I find I learn more when I shut up and
listen.” I was gold thereafter. The TV crew actually learned some things from
my questions that I thought about as the remarks were going on. The TV crew needed visuals, hence the interruptions,
while I needed facts, which I could get either from the remarks or from questions
afterwards.
Thus Bannon’s remark that the news media should shut up and
listen for a while is sound media advice - if the media are interested in
learning something new and not just making the news about them.
Anyhow, after fighting Conway for much of the interview,
Wallace decided to try Bannon’s advice. At
the end of the segment, he shut up and let Kelly Anne Conway say what she had
to say, uninterrupted for what seemed like more than a whole minute of airtime –
eternity by TV standards. Wallace got
the best part of his program letting Conway say her piece because she was not
contentious or advancing partisan talking points. Bannon’s advice worked in that instance.
The media assault against Trump is continuing, and until a
few people in the media are fired, while the rest shut up and listen for a
while and try to use their noodles for more than developing partisan attacks,
the media will continue to embarrass themselves before Trump’s electorate.
-30-
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