The Media Who Cried Wolf

The reaction to President-elect Donald J. Trump’s tweets about the Broadway show “Hamilton” has been priceless. Hollywood stars and the media are treating Trump’s tweets, which chastise the musical’s actors for lecturing Vice President-elect Mike Pence about diversity while he was attending the show, like watergate 2.0. When the media goes nuts over a tweet and cry wolf, they risk desensitizing Americans to real scandal.

Everyone knows the story about the boy who cried wolf. As the story goes, a boy was watching his herd of sheep outside his village when, desperate for attention, he cried, “wolf, wolf!”, and the townspeople came to his aid. Upon realizing that there was no wolf, they went back to their business. When the boy again cried wolf, the villagers rushed back up to the pasture, and again seeing no wolf in sight, headed back down to the village, shaking their heads. The next day, the boy spotted a wolf stalking his flock. He summoned the townspeople by yelling, “wolf, wolf!” No one showed up, and evidently the wolf killed his flock of sheep.

This is exactly what’s happening today with the mainstream media and Hollywood elites. Actor Brandon Dixon, who plays Aaron Burr in “Hamilton”, called out Pence Saturday night as Pence was leaving the theater and thanked him for coming to see the show, mentioning the diversity of the cast and saying, “We truly hope that this show has inspired you to uphold our American values and to work on behalf of all of us.”

Upon hearing this, President-elect Trump, as he so often does, took to Twitter to denounce the musical, tweeting out Sunday morning, “The Theater must always be a safe and special place.The cast of Hamilton was very rude last night to a very good man, Mike Pence. Apologize!” In other tweets, Trump labeled the musical “overrated” and urged the cast to apologize for their “terrible behavior”. He also reviled Dixon’s message as “harassment”. In a tweet which Trump later deleted, he slammed the “Hamilton” actors for not being able to remember their lines.

And Hollywood lost their collective minds! Bryan Cranston, Rachel Bloom, and George Takei sounded off on Twitter regarding Trump’s comments. His tweets even drew rebuke from the ACLU on Twitter, which insisted that Trump should be the one to apologize for questioning free speech. Actor Josh Gad, who just couldn’t contain his outrage to 140 characters, posted a longwinded statement reading, “There are swastikas popping up everywhere, a cabinet of civil rights offenders and deniers being built, and a leader who has placed a white nationalist right by his side.”

The media had a field day! Journalists from Gabriel Sherman of New York Magazine to Maggie Haberman of the New York Times criticized Trump on Twitter. Dean Obeidallah of The Daily Beast rebuked Trump in a CNN column, insinuating that the President-elect would try to stifle free speech. The USA Today affiliated website North Jersey penned a scathing editorial, accusing Trump of violating the fifth amendment, reading, “There is no honeymoon for stomping on free speech…This must stop…And he cannot prevent people from speaking out.”

Despite the fact that Trump has as much right to say what he wants on Twitter as Brandon Dixon does to implore Mike Pence to embrace the virtues of diversity on stage, the Left is yet again making a mountain out of a molehill. This kind of histrionic behavior from major figures in Hollywood and the mainstream media is all too common.

During the 2012 election, Mitt Romney was painted as racist, sexist, misogynist, and homophobic. Vice President Joe Biden even accused Romney of wanting to put black Americans “back in chains”. Even John McCain (R-AZ), a former prisoner of war and senator respected by both sides of the aisle, was reviled as an evil racist hatemonger during his 2008 presidential run. McCain’s running mate Sarah Palin by far got the worst treatment. She was called all manner of female vulgarities, as well as being denounced as every -ist and -ism in the dictionary.

The liberal media has been calling republicans racist, sexist, xenophobic, and bigoted for years, so when we’re faced with a nominee in 2016 that calls to ban Muslims and may well be a sexist, nobody bats an eye. When the President-elect simply makes a comment on Twitter and the media acts like the country is converting to newspeak, what will happen when America is faced with real scandal or tyranny? The mainstream media is destroying itself because, as it turns out, when you cry wolf enough times, nobody’s there to listen.