In principle, this shouldn’t come as anything too surprising for what many people assume to be a free society with a free press, but the reality in the US is a lot different than the superficial impression that many people might have about it. While freedom of the press is enshrined in the First Amendment, the situation has morphed over the years to the point where just a handful of companies control the vast majority of American news broadcasting. The advent of the internet has somewhat diluted the influence of legacy outlets relative to their new peers like the edgy Breitbart, but even so, it’s also created an opportunity for Establishment-aligned sites such as the Huffington Post and others to sprout up and promote their agenda in a new domain.
All of this is relevant to consider when discussing the Mainstream Media’s War on Trump in order to understand just how unprecedented the whole campaign has become. Turn on just about any channel, Fox News included at times, and the President is getting ripped to shreds, oftentimes due to incomplete reporting which leaves out the context of certain comments, but even on select occasions because of absolutely fabricated reports. Perhaps the lowest moment in the history of the American press was when they gleefully reported on the totally fake news that the Russian secret services supposedly had a secret sex tape of Trump engaging in very ‘non-traditional activities’ with prostitutes. It’s for this reason why Trump has repeatedly slammed the Mainstream Media, especially CNN, as being fake news. He even held a fiery press conference the other week where his counterattacks took center stage over the policy formulations and other issues which he was supposed to discuss.
Since that day, which was also his first solo press conference since the inauguration, Trump also fired off a very controversial tweet stating that fake news outlets, including a list of Mainstream Media outlets such as CNN and others, are the enemy of the American people. This prompted his fierce rival, John McCain, to hyperbolically suggest that Trump might be on the path to creating a dictatorship, an exaggerated warning which was happily received and echoed by the Mainstream Media, demonstrating that politics does indeed make for strange bedfellows considering just how much this very same media hated the Senator two elections ago when he was running for President.
To discuss the topic in more detail we are joined by Joe Lauria, journalist who has worked nearly three decades in mainstream media for The Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe and the Sunday Times of London and Marcus Godwyn, political commentator.
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