NBC went all-out against President Donald Trump’s foreign policy during Thursday’s edition of Nightly News. They knocked Trump for getting tough with Iran, pretended he didn’t get tough with Russia, left out key parts of favorable quotes, and repeated dubiously sourced ones. “In these early days of his administration, President Trump is signaling a willingness to take the tough approach over traditional diplomacy no matter the country,” quipped anchor Lester Holt, handing it off to Hillary Clinton-super fan Andrea Mitchell.
One of the major news stories of the day was US Ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, turning up the heat on our longtime adversary Russia for its role in sparking violence in its neighbor Ukraine. The newly confirmed ambassador took the firm stand against Russia in a UN Security Council meeting, stating, “The United States continues to condemn and call for an immediate end to the Russian occupation of Crimea… Our Crimea-related sanctions will remain in place until Russia returns control over the peninsula to Ukraine.”
There was not a single mention of this in Mitchell’s report, nor any report that evening. Mitchell pretended that Ambassador Haley’s address didn’t happen at all. She went so far as to mischaracterize the administration’s current stance with Russia, claiming, “Russia, where the president wants better relations despite a sharp spike in Russian-sponsored fighting in Ukraine.” This, from the network who once reported that Trump brought the entire world “anxiety,” while “in Moscow a party.”
Mitchell’s use of deceptively edited audio and quotes was another major problem with her report. She seemed eager to paint Trump’s phone call with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull as negatively as possible. She played an audio clip of the PM saying, “As far as the nature of the discussion, it was very frank and forthright.”
But that’s not all Turnbull had to say about the call. He told an Australian radio station, quote, “The report that the president hung up is not correct. The call ended courteously. As far as the nature of the discussion, it was very frank and forthright.” Not as dark as Mitchell led NBC’s viewers to believe.
The NBC reporter also used a dubiously sourced quote from another phone call between Trump and Mexico’s President Enrique Pena Nieto. “And even Mexico, where Mr. Trump told the president, “You have a bunch of bad hombres down there.” The White House says he was being light-hearted,” she reported with absolutely no context to what was being discussed.
According to a team of CNN journalists, a transcript provided by Pena Nieto’s office shows Trump’s actual statement. “You have some pretty tough hombres in Mexico that you may need help with. We are willing to help with that big-league, but they have be knocked out and you have not done a good job knocking them out," Trump said. CNN deduced that “Trump made an offer to help Pena Nieto with the drug cartels.”
The quote Mitchell was using appeared to be what the Associated Press purported Trump said. Of AP’s quotes, CNN wrote, “The excerpt of the transcript obtained by CNN differs with an official internal readout of the call that wrongly suggested Trump was contemplating sending troops to the border in a hostile way.”
Mitchell’s distaste for Trump was evident as she closed out her report by gleefully touting an Iranian official mocking our president, “And tonight, a senior advisor to the Ayatollah says Iran won't be, quote, ‘intimidated by an inexperienced person!”