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Comment by sschueller | Hacker News Reader

This is why he got that far in the primaries and then eventually got elected. Every gaffe was reported on and some of it also not true which muddied the water to a point where people stopped listening when serious things came up.

All of this just for profit and tv ratings. There is also ego in there because who want's to be the last to break a story.

We see the same thing happening when a disaster occurs. For example the airport shooting. So much false information is reported just because they have to be the first/exclusive.

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> Every gaffe was reported on and some of it also not true

What wasn't true? Honestly curious as I don't remember any truly spurious accusations against him.

> All of this just for profit and tv ratings. There is also ego in there because who want's to be the last to break a story.

Certainly, but that doesn't discount the validity of the reported incidents.

> We see the same thing happening when a disaster occurs. For example the airport shooting. So much false information is reported just because they have to be the first/exclusive.

Yes and no. I think a lot of that comes from reporting on a developing real-time situation where information is constantly revised. That's rarely the case with speeches or political coverage of this sort.

His obsessive marijuana habit as a youth; his decades-long black nationalist religious associations; his gangster affiliations; his lengthy professional work with convicted terrorists; his family's foreign intelligence connections, etc, etc.

I suspect all of these things were widely reported, yet largely spurious accusations.

This sounds like you just took the largest aspersions of the last 5 presidents and threw them together. That's intentional, right?

  I don't remember any truly spurious accusations against him.

The only one I can think of is the MLK story. In 2009, Obama removed a bust of Winston Churchill (lent by the UK to George W Bush after the 9/11 attack) from the Oval Office, returning it to the British Embassy in Washington [1].

Obama had a bust of Martin Luther King on display in the Oval Office.

After Trump's inauguration, a WH press-pool reporter noticed and reported on Twitter that the Churchill bust was back in the office (it was), then added that the MLK bust had been removed (it hadn't, it was simply obscured by a door).

It was never really a story - just a handful of tweets - and the reporter tweeted the correction within an hour [2]. Trump has used this as an example of "media dishonesty:".

[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/barackobama/462314...

[2] http://www.snopes.com/mlk-bust-oval-office/

There's a meme that Trump is anti-gay or even dangerous for LGBTQ people when he's pretty liberal-to-ambivalent about LGBTQ issues. At least given his statements and positions so far.

Peter Thiel got the same treatment despite being gay and clarifying his position, which wasn't at all unreasonable.

While his personal opinions don't seem to be broadcast regularly I don't think this serves as a great example given his choice of VP.

Only if you don't count virtually everyone he has picked in his administration, starting with his VP.

Here's a more in-depth record of some things that have been inaccurately and widely reported[0], and interestingly enough, from a right-wing magazine that refused to support Trump's nomination.

[0] http://thefederalist.com/2017/01/23/mainstream-media-still-b...

That's a great reference. And very accurately describes the state of the media (broadly speaking).

> Every gaffe was reported on and some of it also not true

Just about everything was true.

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