There he goes again, dodging the question by questioning the source and insulting the questioner.
At an April 6 White House briefing ABC’s Jonathan Karl asked President Trump to comment on Health and Human Services Deputy Inspector General Christi Grimm’s report that 323 hospitals experience supply shortages and testing delays in responding to the COVID 19 pandemic. Questioning the report’s validity and attacking the journalist, Trump’s response is a textbook example of the “If you don’t like the message kill the messenger” fallacy.
Seeming to imply the report is a hatchet job and, as always, without citing evidence, Trump called the report “just wrong.”
A twenty-year HHS executive under Republican and Democrat administrations, the report’s Principle Deputy Inspector General, Ms Grimm receives across-the-board accolades from supervisors and Awards for Excellence. Given the work of collecting and complexity of compiling the data and the multiple eyes and minds involved proofing, correcting, revising and publishing the report, to imply that Ms Grimm or someone skewed the findings to hurt Trump is patently absurd!
After implying the report is bogus, President Trump lit into the questioner, calling Jonathan Karl a “third-rate reporter” who “will never make it” (i.e., not on Fox?). In a March 27 exchange, Karl asked the President if every American who needed a ventilator would get one. Trump’s cryptic and unfathomable response, “Look, don’t’ be a cutie pie. OK?”
According to Wikipedia Jonathan Karl has covered “the White House, Capitol Hill, the Pentagon, and the state Department, and has reported from more than 30 countries” covering U.S politics, foreign policy, the military and has been ABC’s White House Correspondent since 2012. Over thirty years in journalism Karl has been received the Joan Shorenstein Barone Award, the Walter Cronkite Award, an Emmy Award, and the National Press Foundation’s Everett McKinley Dirksen Award.
A “third rate reporter (who’ll) never make it” Mr. President? Unlike you Jonathan Karl has!
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