The Young Turks host Cenk Uygur tore into President-elect Donald Trump for wrongly taking credit for having created 8,000 more jobs for American workers. While Uygur is known to be a progressive YouTube newscast host who is often critical of Trump and his policies, Uygur’s taking down of the American media was a little more surprising.
On Wednesday, Donald Trump announced that Sprint, a mobile phone carrier company, was bringing 5,000 jobs back to the United States, according to Reuters . Although Trump himself had nothing to do with the decision, he appeared to insinuate that he was responsible for brokering the deal with Sprint.
“Because of what’s happening and the spirit and the hope I was just called by the head people at Sprint and they’re going to be bringing 5,000 jobs back to the United States,” Trump told reporters.
Trump added that another company, OneWeb, was also going to create 3,000 more jobs for American workers. However, while it is true that Sprint and OneWeb are going to create almost 8,000 new jobs for American workers in the near future, the fact is that Donald Trump had nothing to do with either company’s decision. As End Gadget reported, a Sprint spokeswoman made clear that the 5,000 additional jobs were part of a previously set larger goal of creating almost 50,000 positions in the United States. Japan’s Softbank, which has a controlling stake in Sprint, had previously announced the creation of the new jobs as part of a $50 billion investment endeavor in the country.
“This is part of the 50,000 jobs that Masa previously announced. This total will be a combination of newly created jobs and bringing some existing jobs back to the U.S,” the spokeswoman for Sprint, Adrienne Norton, said.
Per @alex_mallin a Sprint spokesperson tells ABC “the 5,000 jobs are part of the 50,000 jobs that Masa Son announced a few weeks ago.”
— Katherine Faulders (@KFaulders) December 29, 2016
And yet, despite it being amply clear that the President-elect did not broker any sort of a deal to create new jobs in the United States as far as Sprint and OneWeb are concerned, the American media lapped up Donald Trump’s bragging with utter ease, declaring it an early “victory” for his administration.
“Trump declares victory: Sprint will create 5,000 more jobs,” read CNN Money ‘s headline.
“Trump announces 8,000 more jobs for American workers,” Fox News headline about the story read.
But the problem with such headlines, as The Young Turks host Cenk Uygur said, is that it wrongly conflates the story about the creation of new jobs and Donald Trump in the same line, making it seem as if Trump was the force behind the developments. Such conflation, according to Uygur, is an abdication of a journalist’s duty to inform his viewers. In such a scenario, the American media outlets have become mere pawns for Donald Trump to spread his propaganda.
Uygur particularly singled out MSNBC’s Peter Alexander for hailing Trump as a “genius marketer,” arguing that such a naive assumption was bound to confuse people.
“Well he wouldn’t be so great at ‘marketing; if you didn’t all turn your billion dollar media enterprises into his stenographers. If you didn’t help him by printing it as headlines and then when caught with your hand in the cookie jar, call him a, ‘genius marketer.’ It is a double win for him, thanks to you guys not doing your job.”
Watch the entire video below where The Young Turks Cenk Uygur takes down Donald Trump and the American media for spreading false information about the creation of new jobs.
[Featured Image by Mark Wallheiser/Getty Images]
