On January 7, President Trump tweeted the following: “The Fake News Awards, those going to the most corrupt & biased of the Mainstream Media, will be presented to the losers on Wednesday, January 17th, rather than this coming Monday. The interest in, and importance of, these awards is far greater than anyone could have anticipated!”
The Fake News Awards, those going to the most corrupt & biased of the Mainstream Media, will be presented to the losers on Wednesday, January 17th, rather than this coming Monday. The interest in, and importance of, these awards is far greater than anyone could have anticipated!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 7, 2018
After all that hype, it looks like the “Fake News Awards” is just another case of fake news.
This Tuesday, a day before the anticipated event, reporters asked White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders if the awards were going forward as planned.
“We’ll keep you posted on any details around that potential event and what that would look like,” Sanders responded.
When asked again today, Sanders said, “We’ll keep you guys posted. It’ll be something later today.”
Sure. If the “interest in, and importance” of the awards was “far greater than anyone could have anticipated,” then why the poor planning?
Fake News Awards has been downgraded to a "potential event,” per Sarah Sanders
— Michael M. Grynbaum (@grynbaum) January 16, 2018
From The Washington Post:
Trump first proposed the idea of a “FAKE NEWS TROPHY” in a tweet Nov. 27. He originally envisioned picking the television network that “is the most dishonest, corrupt and/or distorted in its political coverage of your favorite President (me).”
In December, Trump’s reelection campaign announced a variation of this contest, asking supporters to vote on “which mainstream story in 2017 was the most deceitful, embarrassing — and most of all — FAKE!”
The campaign presented only three nominees, a rather small number, considering Trump has tweeted about “fake news” more than 150 times since taking office. One of the three — supposedly one of the absolute worst examples of fake news — was a Time magazine story that wrongly reported that Trump had removed a bust of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. from the Oval Office.
Surely Trump could come up with something more outrageous than that, no? He seemed to think so, when he later said that his awards would cover not merely a single report but “various categories.” On the day of the planned presentations, however, the awards still appear to be a loosely formed idea.
I guess we’ll just have to settled for more unhinged tweets.
Featured image via Twitter
