Some of this is straightforward bias. Anything that President Trump says must be attacked and he must be denounced as a liar. No matter what he says. When he's attacking what has become a major policy plank for the left, the assault is redoubled.
But there's another aspect to this. And Trump has run into it before. The media has become such an echo chamber that its members have no clue what conservatives are thinking or worrying about. Instead, at best, they read some brief sneering coverage from Dave Weigel or someone like that which is about as useful and informative as a survey of Costa Rica by a guy who got off a cruise boat there for 15 minutes and hated it.
When President Trump said the following, everyone to the right of Kasich knew immediately what he was talking about.
"If you were a Muslim you could come in, but if you were a Christian, it was almost impossible and the reason that was so unfair, everybody was persecuted in all fairness, but they were chopping off the heads of everybody but more so the Christians," Trump said in an excerpt of an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network, discussing the Syrian refugees.
That comes from Reuters. It admits that he's discussing Syrian refugees. But then Reuters throws in the completely irrelevant...
Statistics provided by the Pew Research Center last October do not support Trump's argument. Pew research found that 38,901 Muslim refugees entered the United States in fiscal year 2016 from all countries, almost the same number, 37,521, as Christian refugees.
Trump is discussing Syrian refugees. And the numbers there are extremely one sided.
In its last full month in office, the Obama administration has admitted 1,307 more Syrian refugees – pushing the 2016 calendar year total to 15,479, a 606.1 percent increase from the numbers resettled in the U.S. in 2015.
Of the 15,479 Syrian refugees admitted by the end of Thursday:
--15,302 (98.8 percent) are Muslims – 15,134 Sunnis, 29 Shi’a, and 139 other Muslims
--125 (0.8 percent) are Christians – 32 Catholics, 32 Orthodox, five Protestants, four Jehovah’s Witnesses, and 52 refugees described only as “Christian” in State Department Refugee Processing Center data
Those are shocking numbers for a country where huge numbers of Christians have been displaced and persecuted. Not to mention other non-Muslims.
98.8% is not a coincidence. But the media falls into line pushing the same distraction. Here's NBC.
According to the Pew Research Center, the United States welcomed almost 85,000 refugees in 2016. Forty-six percent of them were Muslim.
Again irrelevant.
Reuters reports on what Trump was talking about, but then tries to deny it and argue with him.