Columnist: Coverage of Biden calling Trump voters ‘garbage’ shows why media trust at historic low

CV NEWS FEED // A columnist argued that the media’s extensive coverage of an insult comic’s joke at a Trump rally and downplaying of President Joe Biden calling Trump supporters “garbage” show why the American people’s trust in corporate news is at a historic low.

At a Sunday Trump rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City, comedian and podcast host Tony Hinchliffe – primarily known for his insult comedy – joked that Puerto Rico was an island of “floating garbage.”

Two days later, after multiple mainstream media outlets turned the joke into news stories, Biden said during a Zoom call, “The only garbage I see floating out there is [Trump’s] supporters.”

“The ‘garbage’ contretemps is a perfect distillation of why media trust is catastrophically low,” columnist Guy Benson wrote on X (formerly Twitter) Wednesday morning. 

“These people spent DAYS hyperventilating about a Trump rally pre-show warm-up act insult comic making bad jokes, particularly one about Puerto Rico being a garbage island,” Benson continued:

They turned it into the LEAD STORY in the country. They insisted it was important, was moving votes, was emblematic of their already-hot ‘Nazi/Fascist’ narrative. 

Then the sitting President of the United States called the supporters his party’s opposition “garbage” — clear as day, on video — and the EXACT SAME ‘news’ ‘professionals’ immediately heel-turned into doctoring the quote, offering up excuses, explaining why it didn’t matter, or ignoring it entirely. 

“It’s a laboratory pure instance of screaming, humiliating, self-discrediting bias, presented in a helpful and timely side-by-side,” Benson continued. 

The columnist wrote that the employees of the media outlets running with the story are “the activist base” of the Democratic Party and “are anxious that their party (D) might lose.”

Top prediction website Polymarket currently gives Trump around a two-in-three chance of winning the November 5 election.

“So the hackery must go on,” Benson wrote. “They have no choice. And they know no other way.”

>> BIDEN CALLS TRUMP SUPPORTERS ‘GARBAGE’ <<

Benson has often been critical of Trump in the past. During a Monday FOX News appearance, he blasted the decision by the former president’s campaign to invite Hinchcliffe to the New York City rally as “colossally stupid.”

Also in his X post, Benson referenced a recently released Gallup poll showing that corporate media trust has plummeted for Americans across all partisan affiliations.

According to the poll, an abysmal 12% of Republicans currently have a great deal or fair amount of trust in mass media, compared to an also-dismal 27% of independents, and only a slight majority (54%) of Democrats.

In 2018, Gallup found that 21% of Republicans, 42% of independents, and 78% of Democrats (an all-time-high) said they trusted mass media a great deal or a fair amount. 

>> GALLUP: AMERICANS’ TRUST IN MEDIA HITS RECORD LOW <<

On Tuesday night, Republican vice presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance, R-OH, posted to X a screenshot of a POLITICO report that appeared to downplay or sanitize Biden’s widely lambasted “garbage” comment aimed at Trump supporters.

Rather than directly report the offending sentence (“The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters.”), the POLITICO article described the remark as follows: “Biden, in a Zoom call with the organization Voto Latino, said ‘the only garbage’ was the ‘hatred’ of Trump supporters who said such things about American citizens.”

In his post, Vance asked if the left-leaning publication has “an ounce of integrity? Will they correct this obvious falsehood?”