Trump: America No Longer Has a ‘Free Press’

Then-President Donald Trump arrives on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 24, 2017. Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times

Former President Donald Trump, in an interview, decried the media landscape in the United States, saying it no longer has a “free press.”

Using the current border crisis as an example of the lack of proper coverage, Trump said, “This is not a free press,” during an interview on Lisa Boothe’s podcast on March 22.

“This is a press that we have to be very, very smart to get around, but they don’t cover bad things if it happens to be bad for Democrats. It’s pretty amazing. You take a look at some of the coverage and some of the travesty that’s taking place at the border, and the coverage is not commensurate,” he said.

“If you look at NBC, ABC, CBS, and of course CNN and MSNBC, and see—if you look at some of those networks—it’s just not covered. It’s covered so little. It’s amazing. And it’s a massive story because it’s going to destroy—it’s going to destroy our country.”

Throughout his presidency, Trump decried the “fake news” media, using the pejorative to describe outlets that he believed promoted narratives that targeted him and supporters of the “America first” agenda while generally promoting his opponents or critics. The former president also repeatedly panned MSNBC, The New York Times, and CNN, saying that these outlets are essentially wings of the Democratic Party.

Over the weekend, longtime Getty photojournalist John Moore called on the Biden administration to allow media workers to observe U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents operate as a massive surge of illegal immigrants arrives at the southern border.

“I respectfully ask US Customs and Border Protection to stop blocking media access to their border operations,” Moore wrote on Twitter on March 19. “I have photographed CBP under Bush, Obama and Trump but now—zero access is granted to media. These long lens images [were] taken from the Mexican side.

“There’s no modern precedent for a full physical ban on media access to CBP border operations. To those who might say, cut them some slack—they are dealing with a situation, I’d say that showing the U.S. response to the current immigrant surge is exactly the media’s role.”

Recent polls have suggested that Americans are largely distrustful of corporate, mass media. A Gallup poll released last year showed that only 9 percent of Americans trust the media “a great deal” and 31 percent trust it a “fair amount.” Meanwhile, 33 percent have “no trust” at all in the media and 27 percent don’t trust the media “very much,” according to the survey. In other polls, a significant number of Americans have blamed mass media for exacerbating the political divide in the United States.