A country can never be great with a dishonest press.
–Donald Trump, NBC interview with Kristen Welker, June 2026
If you’ve been following the regular disjointed ramblings, rants and raves of President Donald Trump, even for comedic relief like I do, then you must surely know about his latest hissy-fit last week.
Trump is now legendary for dodging direct questions, deflecting, incoherently rambling, and outright lying at press conferences and interviews. He also frequently insults the press, both print and broadcast (why is it invariably the women who get unfairly chewed out?).
It was, therefore, no big surprise last Friday when, being pressed by Kristen Welker on NBC’s Meet the Press for direct answers to questions and evidence for the lies he was trying to pass off as fact, Trump, as he invariably does, resorted to crude insults. When that failed to make an impression on Welker, he stormed out of the interview.
The full interview and transcript are available here if you’re desperate to watch an orange-tanned man-baby throw his toys out of the cot. I recommend you read the transcript only so you don’t have to punish your eyes as well as your brain. (By the way, orange-tanned sounds so deliciously like orangutan, but it must remain taboo to insult these magnificent creatures when describing Trump)
Following Welker’s effort to coax some semblance of honesty out of Trump, some commentators have pronounced that what we witnessed was a “brief glimpse of journalism” in an era when basic journalistic standards have all but disappeared. The term often used these days to describe the journalistic cowardice we have become accustomed to from mainstream media is stenography.
It describes the practice of not challenging the repetitive, frequent lies spoken mostly by politicians and then regurgitating them in whatever format the journalist uses. It further describes the process whereby journalists succumb to publishing the angle or bias (usually corrupt or bigoted) of the wealthy owners of their print and broadcast media.
However, was Welker’s attempted grilling of Trump a refreshing glimpse of the journalistic standards that we can barely remember any more, or was it just an outlier?
It is ironic that just prior to fleeing, Trump blurted that “A country can never be great with a dishonest press.” From where I’m standing, America has never been great, because that’s always been a lie sold to the rest of the world by a press that is synonymous with dishonesty.
The truth is that objectivity in journalism is a myth. Journalists, like everyone else, are prone to biases. Publications and broadcast empires have always had improper relations with politicians and wealthy individuals, and are thus susceptible to both bias and corruption. The problem is that in the modern era, mainstream media are owned by wealthy degenerates who also own the politicians.
It is ultimately up to us individuals to learn how to think critically and identify and root out the bullshit from the facts. It is not easy when you’re faced with wall-to-wall misinformation, disinformation and outright lies, but it is your responsibility.
lenny unencumbered 