After 20 months of one-sided attacks, smears, and caricatures of President Donald Trump and his administration, more than 300 newspapers across the United States joined together on Aug. 16 to do one thing.
Apologize to their readers for their bias? Not a chance. Declare a truce? Not until hell freezes over. Pause for introspection? No way. They did the banalest thing one can possibly imagine: They published editorials to collectively condemn Trump.
What did Trump do to warrant their wrath? The participants claimed they were defending press freedom. It is true that Trump repeatedly has called some news media “fake news” and more recently dubbed fake news the “enemy of the American people.”
But those are merely words. As a citizen, Trump is completely within his rights to speak freely. The press has called him “idiot,” “buffoon,” “doofus,” and much worse. When Trump hits back in kind, the media appears to be shocked—they can’t take their own medicine.
As president, Trump hasn’t signed any law or issued any executive order that would infringe on press freedom. Sure, one doesn’t have to enact laws or executive orders to curb press freedom. The government can harass journalists, bug their phones, intercept their personal communications, and target them for criminal investigations.
Was it Trump’s Department of Justice that bugged 20 phone lines at The Associated Press in a two-month period in 2012? No, that was Obama’s. Did the Trump administration threaten to throw a New York Times reporter in jail, despite the fact that it didn’t really need his cooperation? No, that was Obama’s. Was it the Trump administration that labeled a journalist a “possible co-conspirator” in a leak probe and had his personal emails monitored? No, that was under Obama.
In the words of one of the involved journalists, Obama was “the greatest enemy to press freedom in a generation.” Do you remember the 300+ courageous newspapers that blasted the Obama administration in unison when it blatantly tramped press freedom? Me neither. Why didn’t the media protest? Was press freedom not so precious for them then?
They didn’t because they have been a part of the mainstream media–Democratic Party complex for a long time. To the media, Obama was one of them; he had to be protected and revered. But Trump was the enemy; he had to be assailed. In the 2016 election cycle, only 19 newspapers in the United States endorsed Trump, but more than 240 threw their support behind Hillary Clinton. Do you think that was a coincidence?
Because of the media’s political alliance with the left, they have helped create the Trump–Russian collusion hoax and shilled for it ever since; they cheered when Trump’s former associates were indicted by Mueller but defended every shady deal by Hillary Clinton; they are not interested in exposing the FISA abuse and all sorts of shenanigans by the FBI and DOJ, yet focused their attention like a laser beam on Trump’s alleged affairs with a stripper and a Playboy model. To advance the Democrats’ agenda and thwart Trump’s, the media went all in. And they wonder why the majority of Americans don’t trust them.
Mainstream media spent 20 months trying to wreck Trump’s approval ratings and failed. The idea that 300+ anti-Trump editorials in one day will magically move the needle in their favor is laughable. If it accomplishes anything, it is revealing this: In Trump’s one-man challenge against the media–Democrat complex, the complex—for the first time in contemporary history—is not winning. They failed to define Trump—instead, Trump defined them.
