Speaking of the hysterical outrage machine being turned up to a 10 after Donald Trump’s birtherism statement Friday morning, the pathetic behavior by the media continued into the afternoon as CNN host Ashleigh Banfield and media reporter Dylan Byers worried that Donald Trump and his supporters could undermine the media to the point that the country would look like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

Before going any further, it’s important to call out the hypocrisy from Banfield and Byers for their despicable and desperate fear-mongering concerning a dictator seeing as how their own network helped harbor one for years.

Some NewsBusters readers may be aware of this already but those who may not be, CNN housed a bureau in Baghdad, Iraq during the high water mark of Hussein’s totalitarian reign and kowtowed to his regime’s demands when it came to censoring important stories like major human rights violations or threats to CNN employees on the ground.

Then-CNN executive Eason Jordan eventually owned up to the network’s behavior in April 2003 with both a New York Times op-ed and appearances on the network. Here’s part of what the Media Research Center wrote at the time:

"I felt awful having these stories bottled up inside me. Now that Saddam Hussein's regime is gone, I suspect we will hear many, many more gut-wrenching tales from Iraqis about the decades of torment," Jordan concluded. "At last, these stories can be told freely." (....) Jordan now admits that CNN kept many of Saddam's secrets; have other networks also censored their own tales of Saddam's evil? If accurate reporting from Iraq was impossible, why was access to this dictatorship so important in the first place? And what truths about the thugs who run other totalitarian states - like North Korea, Cuba and Syria - are fearful and/or access-hungry reporters hiding from the American public?

With this information at the forefront of your mind, let’s return back to Banfield and Byers (which 2016 Noel Sheppard Media Blogger of the Year recipient David Rutz first flagged for the Washington Free Beacon). Prior to Banfield invoking Saddam, Byers bemoaned the general “disregard for the media” in this election by Trump and that “he's raising serious questions about his own legitimacy to be commander in chief in a country that respects the freedom of the press.”

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Banfield then jumped in to make the comparison between Trump and how she’s “covered a couple of dictators in my life in other countries” where their elections were “bummer[s] because they don't let you ask questions either, so that's why the American press, love them or hate them, are critical to this democracy.”

After a clip of Trump supporters applauding the news that his press corps was left behind at the airport, Banfield continued with nods to Saddam and Libya under Muammar Gaddafi:

So what I'm wondering is, why so much cheering? Other than a lot of people who go to Trump events like to besmirch the media, too, but do people not realize or forgetting that other critical element of it? Either you have a media or you have what I witnessed in Saddam's era, in Libya's era where you never got to actually call yourself press or you'd go to jail for it.

Byers responded with more wallowing in bringing up the new Gallup poll showing a record low percentage of Americans trust the media (which my colleague Scott Whitlock wrote about here).

He added that it’s “largely fueled by Republicans and largely fueled by Donald Trump's anti-media rhetoric” and has become “a serious problem, because like you said it is the role of the media to hold these candidates accountable, to hold both the Democratic and Republican and presidential candidates accountable.”

“When you lose that, when you start celebrating restriction of the media, when you start mocking the media, that becomes a serious problem for the very foundation of the democratic project and the American political system,” he concluded with nary of a mention to Clinton’s thumbing at the media and serial problem with telling the truth.

Based on the long-held belief that journalism should be a part of (a small-d) democracy in holding figures of all ideologies together, it’s certainly concerning whenever someone or side isn’t telling the truth. As the Media Research Center has documented for 29 years, the media has revealed themselves to be far less concerned when one side (the left) isn’t holding up their end of the bargain.

The relevant portion of the transcript from CNN’s Legal View with Ashleigh Banfield on September 16 can be found below.