Trump, Saddam and why people mistrust the media

By now, everyone's aware that Donald Trump wandered off message June 5 and told an audience in Raleigh (NC) that Saddam Hussein, for all his sins, "killed terrorists." So what was different about June 5? Hillary Clinton's campaign said it was different. In Politico, we learn that Trump's Hussein praise "finally caught up with him" because "Hillary Clinton's campaign tore into his latest comments." NBC News notes that Trump said this at a rally with Sen Bob Corker (R-TN), which could lead to a clash and some awkward questions; otherwise, the only new thing is that "Hillary Clinton's campaign seized the opportunity to once more paint Trump as unfit for office." And so on.

The story is not that Trump argued that the United States would be better off if a dictator had been allowed to stay in power in Iraq; the story is that things are different now, because the presumptive Democratic nominee is whacking him for saying it. By consistently covering Trump's argument over time, and by following up on it, media outlets did their job to inform voters. That was why June 5's collective Captain Renault moment was so strange, and so demonstrative of why many media consumers are skeptical of what they're hearing. Instead of a debate on the facts -- should Hussein have been removed? Did he "kill terrorists," in a contradiction of what Americans were told before the war? -- there was manufactured outrage, straight from a rival campaign.