Fox’s Kurtz Blames Media For Hyping Trump’s Russia Hacking Comments

FILE - This April 25, 2012 file photo shows journalist Howard Kurtz at the world premiere of "Knife Fight" during the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival in New York. Kurtz is shifting from CNN to Fox News Channel. Fox said T... FILE - This April 25, 2012 file photo shows journalist Howard Kurtz at the world premiere of "Knife Fight" during the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival in New York. Kurtz is shifting from CNN to Fox News Channel. Fox said Thursday, June 20, 2013, that Kurtz would take over its weekend media criticism show, "Fox News Watch." He'd been the host of CNN's "Reliable Sources." (AP Photo/Evan Agostini, File) MORE LESS
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Fox News media analyst Howard Kurtz thinks the uproar over Donald Trump urging Russia to release emails from Hillary Clinton if that frenemy nation had hacked her private sever is just another case of “media-generated outrage.”

In a Thursday column, Kurtz interpreted Trump’s lines as “obviously sarcastic”—the defense that the Republican nominee himself offered up.

“To believe that the Republican nominee was dead serious in urging an adversary of the United States to commit or complete an act of espionage against his Democratic opponent is to believe that Trump is clinically insane,” Kurtz wrote.

Trump said in a free-wheeling Wednesday press conference that he hoped the Russian government had accessed emails from Clinton’s server and that he would “like to have them released.”

Pressed by an NBC reporter if he had any “qualms” about asking a foreign government to hack into a U.S. politician’s emails, a seemingly irritated Trump said, “No, gives me no pause.”

The real estate mogul sent a tweet after the presser ended encouraging “Russia or any other country or person” who has accessed the emails to share them with the FBI, which completed an investigation into Clinton’s private server without recommending any charges against the former secretary of state.

Trump’s surrogates struggled to come up with a unified response to the backlash over the remarks, which left national security experts and pundits from both sides of the aisle in disbelief.

Jason Miller, Trump’s senior communications director, said that Trump was “clearly saying” anyone who had the emails should hand them over to the FBI, even though Trump made no mention of the FBI during his remarks. Adviser Rudy Giuliani argued the same, while ally Newt Gingrich claimed the comments were a “joke.”

Trump told Fox News on Thursday that he was “of course” being sarcastic.

Kurtz wrote that “as a longtime Trump-watcher,” he could tell right away that the real estate mogul wasn’t being serious.

He noted that most “professional politicians avoid sarcasm” so they don’t become embroiled in situations like this, but that Trump “delights in it.”

Notable Replies

  1. Another stooge to blow Trump.

    Idiot.

  2. Avatar for zsak zsak says:

    Benghazi!

  3. Howie, if saying something ridiculous meant he was just pulling a Poe, then his whole flipping campaign has been one tediously long Poe.

  4. At least he’s spinning his horse shit from Fox News now and doesn’t have the veneer of respectability that his role covering politics for the Washington Post used to give him.

  5. Trump was not being sarcastic in that statement, he was completely serious, as any reasonable observer would think. He followed it up with a tweet saying the same thing. It wasn’t a mistake, he meant it…and he’s trying to walk it back by conflating these emails, the DNC emails, and “sarcasm”. Odds are his fans will buy it. This is the second prong, where it becomes “media outrage” instead of outrage by experts across the spectrum.

    We’ll see if the media backs off, or if they keep pursuing what is a serious breech of ethics and decorum, as well as possible influence on our election by a foreign government.

Continue the discussion at forums.talkingpointsmemo.com

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