RUSH: So I’m fiddling around over the weekend, dillydallying, doing some things. I didn’t get to play golf because the courses would not allow carts. We’ve had so much rain down here, no carts. No carts, no golf for me. I refuse to ruin a round of golf by having to walk it. I know, the statement is why ruin a good walk by playing golf. It’s the other way around for me. So, anyway, I haven’t played with it much, but I decided to go and open the Apple News app, which is, for those of you familiar with it, a Flipboard-like app. It’s basically an RSS feed made to look like magazine, news articles and so forth. And I saw this thing — and actually where it was, it was in the, for lack of a better word, the notifications center of my iPhone. It was actually on the search page. Doesn’t matter where it was.
The story was NBC reporting that Donald Trump had been shouted and protested off the stage Friday night in Raleigh. This was Saturday when I was looking at this. I said, “I’ve seen this nowhere else. What the heck is this?” So I went scouring, I went looking. I couldn’t find anywhere where it was reported that Trump had been shouted down, humiliated and embarrassed, and forced off the stage at a campaign event. And it turns out the reason I couldn’t find it anywhere is ’cause it never happened. It didn’t happen. There were protesters and so forth, but they are as usual at a Trump event, they are drowned out, they are overrun and dominated by Trump supporters.
It was a crowd of seven to 10,000. This guy is drawing general campaign sized crowds to his events. Not one of them has been shut down. That story that I found on the Apple search page didn’t last long. A couple hours, I went back and it was gone. But it just goes to show you how literal drivel and bilge can end up in the Drive-By Media. I didn’t ask Cookie for any of this, but CNN has a Saturday show. (interruption) What? (interruption) Oh, yeah, I’m gonna get to the Obama speech.
Anyway, so I was looking at this and I was trying to figure out, you know, how all this happened. And then I find out that Trump’s campaign manager or one of his spokesmen or something, I think it was a woman was on Saturday’s or Sundays, I don’t know which, CNN’s media introspective show. You know, all these networks have a half hour show on themselves where they report what they did the last week and what they got right and what they got wrong, but basically how they never get anything wrong because when it is wrong it’s always in the service of the better or what have you.
Anyway, Trump’s female spokesman, I think it was a female, made mincemeat of the CNN host Brian Stelter and mentioned this MSNBC story. She was making the point the double standard in the media is all over the place, and he couldn’t get off the fact that Trump said thousands protested or cheered after 9/11. My point here is that the media just totally made it up, it was not true, it didn’t even come close to being true, it ended up being disseminated somewhat. I don’t think it was widely disseminated. It was a Saturday or Sunday when it happened, mostly Saturday, Saturday night, wasn’t up long enough. But it’s just another in an endless and a long line of illustrations of the media and journalistic malpractice.
Now, the Obama speech — (interruption) Well, no, because I was shocked when I saw it, when I see the story “Trump Shouted Down, Forced to Leave Stage”? I mean, that would be big if that actually happened. That’s why I thought it was such a big deal. It turns out it was just totally bogus. When Trump did leave the stage, it was to spend time signing autographs and chatting with people for an hour. It wasn’t even close to be being true.