Media panic since success of attack on ISIS leader derails their narrative about Trump and ISIS

Mollie Hemingway:

Legacy media outlets responded to President Trump’s announcement of the U.S. military’s successful mission against ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi with their trademark hostility and anger. That’s because the inarguably good news threatens corporate media goals for shaping foreign policy, impeaching the president, and defeating Trump in 2020.

“Last night was a great night for the United States and for the world. A brutal killer, one who has caused so much hardship and death, has violently been eliminated — he will never again harm another innocent man, woman or child,” Trump told the nation on Sunday. “He died like a dog. He died like a coward. The world is now a much safer place.”

Yet the media reacted not with the praise and excitement that greeted President Obama’s announcement of a similar successful operation against Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, but with anger and rage. Many media outlets soiled their beds, but the Washington Post is representative of the hard work that went into spinning the killing of Baghdadi into, somehow, a negative story for Trump, beginning with a hagiographic look at Baghdadi as not a brutal rapist and murderer of his political and religious foes but as an “austere religious scholar.” Really....
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It takes effort to try to spin the unalloyed good news of the Trump administration’s success as a net negative, but corporate media were up for the challenge. That’s because successes such as this one undercut the narratives they’re trying to force into the national conversation.

Corporate media have moved from at least projecting concern for reporting the actual news into unembarrassed political actors. That enables them to flamboyantly spin — as opposed to their previous method of subtly spinning — even major news with indisputable facts.

The 2016 campaign was a humiliating defeat for Hillary Clinton, but also for political media. Media outlets never understood the electorate they were paid big dollars to write and broadcast news about. They confidently asserted Trump had no chance to win, and convinced themselves that casting off journalistic standards was defensible because of the certain ruin Trump would bring.

Instead, President Trump’s administration has been marked by success in the domestic and foreign spheres. The economy is humming, including job and wage growth the media had previously said was unlikely to impossible to achieve. This is due to tax cuts, tax reform, and unprecedented deregulation. No new wars have been launched, much less the apocalyptic nuclear wars the media predicted. A long overdue recalibration with China is taking place.
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The Post has often disgraced itself with its anti-Trump agenda.  It has become hard to find a straight news story in a paper that is filled with anti-Trump vitriol. It is embarrassing for the pro-Obama media to have to deal with ISIS when their guy turned him loose from a US prison compound and facilitate his genocide with an ill-advised retreat from Iraq.  It was an unprecedented strategic blunder by Obama and his team of amateurs in his White Hosue.

Their current embarrassment comes from their attempt to portray Trump's withdrawal from Northern Syria as something that would enable ISIS.  That narrative is brutally slapped down by taking out of Bagdaddhi and his apparent succors.