Fact-free media bigots attack Trump after Annapolis tragedy            

Obama associate Rahm Emanuel notoriously counseled partisans to "never let a crisis go to waste." In that reptilian spirit, media voices sped to their Twitter accounts to exploit the Annapolis tragedy. 

Investigation of the Annapolis shooter eventually turned up evidence of his longstanding animus toward the Capital Gazette newspaper, one that included social media harassment and courtroom confrontations but was wholly unrelated to President Trump and his legitimate media fault finding.

But before any facts were known about the shooter, the president's critics charged his legitimate press criticism had engendered the assault. 

Tweets implicating President Trump's rhetoric were rushed online by James LaPorta (Newsweek), Jessica Valenti (GuardianUS), Mark Harris (Vulture), Danielle Campoamor (Bustle), and Aaron Rupar (ThinkProgress).

Reuters' Rob Cox initially tweeted to Trump: "you have blood on your hands." (Cox did later post an apologetic admission of error, unlike his inky, biased fellows.)

Big Media voices were joined in Trump-smearing by a galaxy of lesser lights

Now, those of us championing Trump's America First cause had long seen firsthand the smug disingenuousness of the mainstream political media.

When candidate Trump assailed unrelenting and falsity-freighted press crusades against him, we roared approval.

Our wariness endured after Trump's victory. An October 18, 2017 Detroit Free Press report was headlined "Donald Trump's 'fake news' claims are real, say 46% of voters in [Morning Consult / Politico] poll,"

And the Knight Foundation Trust, Media, and Democracy initiative published on January15, 2018 a poll Knight had conducted in conjunction with Gallup. A release on that poll, which had included some 19,000 respondents, summarized its findings: 

[M]ost Americans believe it is now harder to be well-informed and to determine which news is accurate. They increasingly perceive the media as biased and struggle to identify objective news sources. They believe the media continue to have a critical role in our democracy, but are not very positive about how the media are fulfilling that role.

Several of President Trump's post-Annapolis, Twitter slurrers recycled a garbage argument popular during his campaign. Despite Trump's carefully specifying "fake news," many persisted in misrepresenting his targeted brickbats as referencing the entire journalistic enterprise.

Of course, that only underscored his point. By refusing to acknowledge the pivotal distinction, journalists essentially threw arms about Fake News's shoulders, claimed it as a legitimate component of a free press, and declared that to call out the improper former was to necessarily threaten the proper latter.

There is a fundamental flaw in arguments that by castigating shoddy journalism, Trump evinces hostility to the public interest, Who is the true enemy of the people: a press that dissembles, or the man who points that out?

It was only correct of the president to tweet on February 17, 2017 that "The FAKE NEWS media (failing New York Times @NBCNews @ABC @CBS @CNN is not my enemy. It is the enemy of the American people!" 

Truer words were never typed, as scurrillious media tweets in the wake of the Annapolis shooting handily illustrated.

(Sections of this chapter appeared previously in the author's 2017 That a Man Can Again Stand Up, and 2018 Ideas Afoot, both issued by Bromley Press)