Appearing as a guest on Thursday's Morning Joe to promote his new film on the Iraq War, Shock and Awe, liberal film maker Rob Reiner claimed that Fox News, Breitbart News and other right-leaning news outlets are acting as "state-run media" for President Donald Trump, and laughably claimed that President Bill Clinton "wasn't supported by the mainstream media."
At 8:33 a.m. Eastern, as Reiner complained about the media not doing enough to challenge President George W. Bush before the Iraq War, MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski asked, "Where is truth now in the age of Trump?" leading her liberal guest to go after right-leaning media outlets. Reiner:
That's the problem. This is the first time in American history where we have a President who is supported by essentially state-run media, you know, with Fox and Breitbart and Sinclair and Alex Jones. It's very, very tough because those people are cemented into their information bubble and hard to break through.
It's like what the Russians were able to do -- active measures, these misinformation campaigns. You just throw lies out, and you confuse people, and they can't see the truth, which makes your job even more difficult now.
The liberal film maker's complaints about conservatives being in an "information bubble" suggests that he is oblivious to the Left's own media bubble. The very MSNBC that he was appearing on rarely gives air to right-leaning commentators unless they are mostly agreeing with liberals in spite of whatever right-leaning history those commentators may have had in the past.
A bit later, Reiner then claimed that President Clinton did not have similar media support in the 1990s:
Both sides have used propaganda. That's just the way things work -- either they sell a policy or a rationale to go to war. The difference now is that the propaganda and the lies that are coming out of the White House are backed up by big chunks of media. That didn't happen during the Clinton -- Clinton got a lot of pressure, and he pushed back in his world of propaganda, but he wasn't supported by the mainstream media in that.
He then likened the situation in the U.S. to the old Soviet Union as he soon added:
And you look at, you know, the active measures that the Soviets have done and now the Russians have done for years -- this is what it looks like. It is feeding false narratives, false information, and clouding us to the point where we throw our hands up. We don't know what the truth is anymore, and he has now cemented 40 percent of this country in that thinking.
Brzezinski responded by voicing agreement: "That's exactly what a dictator and authoritarian wants."
