“Trump really blew it with this one!”
That is one example of the many reactions I have received in the days after President Donald Trump followed through on issuing a pardon for former Culpeper County, Virginia, Sheriff Scott Jenkins. The Daily Signal previously reported on Jenkins’ conviction on federal bribery charges brought by the Biden Department of Justice.
That knee-jerk reaction from people is understandable because, as has been my experience with Trump over the years, people form their opinions based solely on what the news media has told them about what the president did rather than what he actually did.
I did a scan of the news coverage, and our Daily Signal column reporting on the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association petitioning the president for the pardon was the only one I could find that delved into Jenkins’ court proceedings and the judge’s restrictions on the sheriff’s defense. The judge limited Jenkins’ ability to present contradicting testimony and the timeline of events that preceded the Department of Justice’s “sting operation” against him.
To many, that sting operation seemed intended to ensnare the sheriff for joining other Virginia sheriffs in declaring their counties would be “sanctuaries” for gun owners after the Democrat-controlled Virginia General Assembly proposed several anti-Second Amendment bills. Jenkins was also gaining significant national media attention for this as well as for being part of the team investigating the Hunter Biden laptop scandal.
But to the public that only saw the TV or local newspaper coverage, Jenkins had been found guilty of the kind of corruption that in most circumstances would be abhorrent to a conservative. He was accused of selling auxiliary deputy positions in his department for campaign contributions.
Similar was the reaction of many American conservatives when they were told by the media that Trump had called Nazis “fine people” during the 2017 Charlottesville protests over the removal of Confederate statues from public property. And just as it was with that infamous day in Charlottesville, so it has been with Jenkins: There was never a thorough reporting of events.
Telling the whole story matters. This growing habit of “strategic omissions” in news reporting is a dangerous trend that is more and more frequently driving wedges between neighbors. Like a jury trial, one needs to know all the facts before coming to a just conclusion, and it is imperative in a free society to make sure that we all find more than one source of information (and if possible, the original source material).
How does this relate to Jenkins’ story?
In the same way people were told that the sheriff had been convicted of “selling badges” or told that Trump praised Nazis, Republicans in Washington are being pressured to give up on the minor changes they want to make in a budget reconciliation bill with regard to entitlement programs like Medicaid.
The story has been told that Trump and the Republicans’ “Big, Beautiful Bill” would cause 1.4 million people to lose Medicaid coverage. Now, the constituents “back home” have started calling their Republican members of Congress, telling them that they better not allow that to happen.
However, what people were not told in the reporting was that the people losing Medicaid were noncitizens and that taking them off Medicaid would actually help protect the program and ensure that it was available for qualified Americans.
It’s just the difference of a couple of words left out of news coverage, but as with the coverage of Jenkins and the president’s pardoning of him, this kind of half-truth reporting changes the entire meaning of the story, the public’s perception of it, and in the case of one sheriff, a man’s entire public reputation.