The mainstream media seems to look for new ways to feed their Trump-Russia hysteria.
Recently the leftist media ran a story about Donald Trump having ties to Russia because his Miss Universe Pageant was held in Moscow in 2013. Somehow a beauty contest from four years ago is supposed to be proof of a nefarious alliance.
Now the left is hysterical for an equally ridiculous reason.
Donald Trump had a meeting with Vladimir Putin…at a summit for world leaders. Apparently such an exchange is untoward behavior.
From NBC News:
President Donald Trump met with Russian President Vladimir Putin a second time during the G-20 summit earlier this month, White House officials confirmed Tuesday.
Trump spoke to Putin at the end of a couples-only social dinner at the summit in Hamburg, Germany, the official said, reiterating it was a social dinner. Pull-asides are typically less formal than official bilateral meetings, which Trump and Putin also shared.
The White House did not previously disclose or offer a record of what was discussed during the meeting, which was first reported by Ian Bremmer, president of the international consulting firm Eurasia Group.
The meeting was “brief,” White House Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters off-camera Wednesday, pushing back on reports that the pull-aside lasted an hour.
“We weren’t following him around with a stopwatch,” she said, but “certainly not an hour.”
Sanders labelled scrutiny of the meeting as the media’s “Russian fever” and blamed news outlets for trying “to create a story that didn’t exist.”
[…]
During that Friday night dinner, Putin was seated next to first lady Melania Trump.
Trump and Putin’s first face-to-face meeting as world leaders came while in Germany, with the bilateral lasting over two hours.
Trump took to Twitter to lambaste the media for conjuring up a narrative that something insidious happened at a dinner party.
Donald J. Trump on Twitter
The Fake News is becoming more and more dishonest! Even a dinner arranged for top 20 leaders in Germany is made to look sinister!
Trump is precisely right. Mainstream outlets like to pretend they’re remaining objective, but the agenda is clear: Make as many connections between Trump and Russia as possible, no matter how innocuous.
So instead of providing proof and stating a firm position, the media strategy is death by a thousand nothing-burgers.
When the more dubious reports get discredited, the retractions or corrections are only a blip on the radar.
The media will only continue to have a credibility problem if they keep contorting benign stories of dinner parties into diabolical backroom deals.