Metro (sometimes called Metro.co.uk) began life as the online sister of another newspaper that's now available (for free!) on Britain's public-transport system. It broke free of that hard-copy newspaper in 2015. It still belongs to the same company and it's even based in the same building! However, you'll be glad to know that Metro¹ (“The world's most popular free newspaper”) and Metro² (“News... but not as you know it”) are completely different publications with completely separate editorial teams. Yes.

Metro1 is slightly more serious and less “tabloid” that Metro²; though they both propagate (broadly speaking) the same liberal-left political views.

Bear all the above in mind when -- in what follows -- you read Metro's critical comments on Donald Trump's own critical comments about... yes, the media!

Metro and Trump on Women

Metro² -- which has managed to secure millions of readers every day – is a strange news outlet. (I'll stop using the superscript 2 now.) It's unashamedly political and doesn't seem to be able to distinguish opinion pieces from news items.

Take the piece on Trump titled 'Donald Trump’s latest trolling proves exactly what he thinks of women'.

It starts off badly and gets worse from there. It deigns to tell us “what [Trump] thinks of women”. It turns out it's what Trump thinks of one woman (MSNBC's Ms Mika Brzezinski) and even that's pretty tame. Still, if you don't like a man's politics; then everything he says and does is fair game.

This righteous young journalist pontificates more. He writes: “Dear. Lord. This guy has zero respect for the opposite sex.” (I bet Oliver McAteer himself is a consummate New Man. I also bet that he washes the dishes at least once a month and uses oodles of expensive face cream.)

All this is in response to one of Trump's jokes (quoted by Metro). It's fairly funny; if a little mean. It goes:

“…to Mar-a-Lago 3 nights in a row around New Year’s Eve, and insisted on joining me. She was bleeding badly from a face-lift. I said no!”

What has to be stated here is that MSNBC's Ms. Mika Brzezinski fired the first shot when she accused Trump of being “needy”. Or should I say that that she indulged in a bit of bullying because her employer -- MSNBC -- accused Trump himself of “bullying”. Despite her reference to being needy, Trump has also been a serial target of Ms. Brzezinski for a long time. Indeed, Metro itself even shows us one of Brzezinski's previous bullying anti-Trump tweets!

Just desserts anyone?

To get back to Metro.

What these pious anti-sexists (such as Metro's Oliver McAteer) seem unable to distinguish is that a joke about one woman (or even a few women) is not also a joke about all women (or women generally). The same is true of jokes about blacks. According to some pious and pure anti-sexists (or anti-racists), however, whatever the content of a joke about a woman (or a black) is, it is -- by definition -- sexist (or racist). The very fact that's it's a joke and it's also about a woman (or a black person) is literally all it takes... Unless that woman is Prime Minister Theresa May or the black is an Uncle Tom -- then women and blacks are (almost) fair game.

So how would a joke about, say, a well-known “Tory MP” having a penis enlargement go down at Metro? Probably very well. In fact, I've seen such things in this glossy and glitzy rag.

Anyway, the hypocrisy is further confounded by the fact that in one breath Donald Trump is castigated for “cyber bullying”; and in the next breath, this imbecile writes:

“Luckily, these guys have a sense of humor and can take a bit of cyber-bulling, unlike someone we know well [Trump].”

(Why is a British journalist using American spellings anyway?)

So "cyber-bulling" is okay if aimed at Trump and other nasty right-wing white men; bad when aimed at CNN journalists, blacks, and Muslims?

Metro again indulges in (meta/second-order) hypocrisy by implicitly criticising Trump's own hypocrisy. Metro continues:

“Ironic that the FLOTUS pledged to head up a campaign against online trolling when Trump first took office. Yeah, maybe start with the problems at home first.”

Metro and Trump on the Media

To return to the beginning of this article. Here's Metro's (or Oliver McAteer's) very first line:

“The president of the United States of America (just remember that, for a second) took his ‘FAKE NEWS’ campaign to the next level this morning by going after the presenters of Morning Joe.”

You couldn't get more opinionated than that, could you?

Metro then says that “Trump’s been stepping up his campaign of hate against the media this week.” Well, for a start, the writer (or Metro itself) is part of that media. So I wonder if that is in any way relevant to Metro's piously hypocritical words about Trump.

Moreover, rather than castigate the journalists who lied about Trump's connections with Russia, this infantile journalist turns the whole story on its head and castigates Trump for having a go at the journalists responsible for those lies! He informs us:

“In case you missed it, three journalists from CNN resigned on Monday June 26 over a Russia-related story that had to be retracted. Trump celebrated, obviously.”

It seems that because this journalist's views are broadly in line with CNN (or at least its position on Trump) that he therefore has no critical eyes for anyone other than Trump. He continues:

“But somehow, in between dealing with an international travel ban and meeting the Indian PM, he found time to take yet another swipe at the news channel.”

At least he deigns to actually quote Trump thus:

“'Fake News CNN is looking at big management changes now that they got caught falsely pushing their phony Russian stories. Ratings way down!'”

Again, there's not a single critical word here about CNN itself.

It's also strange that left-leaning or liberal-left people (perhaps even the ones who work for Metro) have had it in for the “right-wing media” for years. Yet here we have a Metropolitan “liberal” talking dismissively about “Trump's hate for the media.”

He tells us, for example, that Trump “went rogue and blasted loads of other American media outlets as well”. He then quotes Trump's tweet itself:

“'So they caught Fake News CNN cold, but what about NBC, CBS & ABC? What about the failing @nytimes & @washingtonpost? They are all Fake News!'”

What's of interest to Metro (or Oliver McAteer) here isn't Fake News and media lies: it's the fact that Trump Tweeted about Fake News and media lies!

Another funny thing about this cartoon piece (from a cartoon newspaper) is that its slags off Trump's “inappropriate tweets” and then tells us how funny various anti-Trump Tweets are. Indeed, Metro itself is often chock-a-block with such tweets!

The words “kettle”, “pot” and “black” spring to mind here.

Paul Austin Murphy is a writer on politics and philosophy. He's had articles published in The Conservative Online, Intellectual Conservative, Human Events, Faith Freedom, Think-Israel, Brenner Brief (Broadside News), New English Review, etc. His philosophy blog can be found here. His blog on politics can be found here.