Not Another Peep, Streep

“Mistaken” doesn’t seem to fit the facts. “Lying” does. And yet, I don’t think that is what we must conclude.

It is difficult to conclude that Meryl Streep was mistaken in her grandstanding attack on President-Elect Donald Trump. Why? If she was “mistaken” that means she honestly thought she was speaking the truth. But the falsehood she repeated—with the “heart-felt,” self-righteous sincerity she brought to her acting roles—has been exposed so often, and the truth is so easily available, especially to one with her connections and resources, that “mistaken” doesn’t seem to fit the facts. “Lying” does.

And yet, I don’t think that is what we must conclude. Because all day today, U.S. news media repeated the video clip of her remarks—literally dozens of times just on the one channel I watched—and never, at least that I heard, corrected or questioned her. Perhaps some commentator, somewhere, did so.

In case you were camping in the Maine Woods for the past two days, here is the story. At the Golden Globes on Sunday evening, Meryl Streep received the Cecil B. DeMille lifetime achievement award. She took advantage of the moment—as Hollywood types do more and more these days—to purvey her politics, and, as it turns out, to reveal that her intellect, if not her acting ability, does seem to be “over-rated.”

No, Meryl, you have lost the ability to distinguish between a movie and real life. It did not happen in real life, only in the fictionized version created and endlessly promulgated by the media.

Without naming President-Elect Trump, she said that “…the person asking to sit in the most respected seat in our country imitated a disabled reporter. Someone he outranked in privilege, power, and the capacity to fight back. It kind of broke my heart when I saw it. I still can’t get it out of my head because it wasn’t in a movie. It was real life.”

(No, Meryl, you have lost the ability to distinguish between a movie and real life. It did not happen in real life, only in the fictionized version created and endlessly promulgated by the media.)

She continued, “And this instinct to humiliate, when it’s modeled by someone in the public platform, by someone powerful, it filters down into everybody’s life, ’cause it kind of gives permission for other people to do the same thing.”

I was not the writer who uncovered the truth about this tale. That honor belongs to others, who discovered and told the real story of the ‘disabled reporter’. Here it is, in brief:

At a rally on November 21, 2015, Mr. Trump said that he recalled reading in the press that on the night of the 9/11 attacks, Arab-Americans were cheering the attack on roofs in New Jersey. He said he knew it was not “politically correct” to say so, but that is the report he read.

Major news outlets immediately denied there ever had been such a report. The Washington Post did a “fact check” just to confirm this. Nope, no story, said the Post; another Trump whopper.

And then, oh heaven! It turned out that Washington Post’s own story by Serge Kovaleski, on September 18, 2001, had said that, and that police had arrested some of the demonstrators. Oh my, and the Post had just done a “fact check” of all media and reported finding nothing.

Two Washington Post agents, finding Kovaleski now working at the New York Times, pressed him and he backtracked on his story, saying, at least as quoted: “I certainly do not remember anyone saying that thousands or even hundreds of people were celebrating. That was not the case, as best as I can remember …”

True, Mr. Trump did say “thousands and thousands” and that was not confirmed (on September 16, 2001, news video merely said “swarms”). But this had nothing to do with the media smear campaign that followed. That campaign did not dwell on the numbers, but veered from the “New Jersey” story to a fabricated libel of Trump as mocking a disabled individual. Back to “identity politics.” This is how it happened.

Confronted with this seeming recantation of the Post story, at a rally in South Carolina, Mr. Trump recounted the above explanation and, in one of his unrestrained moments, pantomimed the flustered reporter protesting “No, no, no—I never said that.” Mr. Trump brushed his hands up and down, laughing at the reporter desperately denying the charge of having written a story published under his by-line 16 years ago and never doubted to this moment. And, just for good measure, he made a quite funny face of the horrified reporter.

It so happens that Mr. Kovaleski has a disability, one hand frozen in a curled-over position. Some enterprising photographer took a single frozen frame from the entire video of Mr. Trump’s antics, at the precise moment his hand seemed to be curled down; the photographer then set this beside a photograph of the reporter, standing in the same pose as Mr. Trump, his hand curled down. There you go, a headline story: Trump mocks the disability of reporter. It was shown thousands of times with new captions like “What will we tell our children?”

But, it succeeded in diverting attention from the Washington Post’s ridiculous “fact finding” report, missing its own story, and from Mr. Trump’s point about Arab-Americans in New Jersey cheering the attack on the World Trade Center.

It is not true, as endlessly repeated, that the Democratic Party was the “big loser” in the 2016 Presidential election. After all, they had held the White House for eight years, Hillary Clinton won the popular if not the electoral vote, the U.S. media overwhelmingly accepted and promulgated the message of the Democratic candidate, and an anger, bitterness, and fear surrounds the coming inauguration of President-Elect Trump.

No, it was not the Democratic Party but the U.S. media that was a decisive loser. Liberal/Leftist newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post, prestigious magazines from the Atlantic to the Economist, and most television channels apart from Fox News, pulled out all stops to defeat Donald Trump and (when their favorite, Senator Bernard Sanders, had lost the Democratic nomination) to elect Hillary Clinton president.

Supposed “news” pages and editorial pages, purported “news” reports and panel discussions, all dissolved into a virtually seamless propaganda campaign with the single goal of defeating Trump. Objectivity, neutrality, balance, and professional reporting—and then honesty, fairness, and perspective—were flung aside in the headlong and later panicked crusade to make the election come out the “right way.”

Convinced that they had succeeded, that the election would sweep Clinton into office and the press would be viewed as the nation’s savior, the mainstream media awaited vindication, triumph, and gleeful self-congratulation as election evening began.

In this coming battle, the embarrassing public display by Meryl Streep, and its limitless exploitation by the media, is but an initial skirmish.

But, at first tentatively, then with emerging conviction, and finally with stunning decision in states not even considered “in play” for Trump, the American electorate—outside the great urban areas identified with Democratic politics—rendered a clear verdict on the media’s influence on their perception of American reality.

Don’t expect the media to forgive this humiliation. The campaign against Trump has continued without interruption. The reporters, editors, pundits, and commentators hope to discredit and then destroy President Trump—as they earlier destroyed President Richard Nixon for his landslide defeat of another Liberal/Leftist darling, George McGovern, in 1972.

In this coming battle, the embarrassing public display by Meryl Streep, and its limitless exploitation by the media, is but an initial skirmish.

You are too beautiful for the sacrificial altar, Meryl. Not another peep, Streep.

About the Author: Walter Donway

Walter Donway has written and edited for Savvy Street since its inception in 2014. His essays and interpretative commentaries on breakthrough books have dealt with philosophy, politics, literature, science, history, psychology, and personalities. His new novel, "Retaking College Hill,” became Amazon’s #1 bestseller in political fiction. This year, the Atlas Society published his Pocket Guide to The Fountainhead and Romanticism Reborn--essays on the Romantic movement in literature and its 20th Century revival in Ayn Rand's novels. His collections of essays and short stories and his "Collected Poems" are available on Amazon. He lives in East Hampton with his wife, Robin.