By Dave Andrusko
The instant response—and the perfect response—came from Karen Townsend of Hot Air: “In other words, just a normal day in Trump’s America. ” She is referring to The Boston Globe which had “named itself America’s protector of the free press and is coordinating a day designated for newspapers across the country to run editorials declaring war on President Trump’s labeling of the press as the enemy of the people.”
What to say? Let’s start with a truism: it is literally impossible to exaggerate how full of themselves the major media types are or how absolutely hypocritical they are.
To be clear, it is absolutely their right to criticize President Trump every second of every minute of every hour of every day in the harshest, most incendiary, and/or grossly unfair terms. That is how a free press in this nation often treats its presidents, except (as Townsend amusingly put it) “when the press took an eight-year sabbatical during the Obama administration.”
President Trump, for good or for ill, long ago decided he would give as good as he got. He simply refuses to sit passively by while the New York Times and the Washington Post and the other regular Trump haters rip him to shreds.
In his tweets he describes what they write/report as “fake news,” and is not shy about turning the tables on them. They, not he, he says are the “enemy of the people.”
Townsend’s spot-on point is, if a 100 or 150 newspapers all editorially bash President in unison on August 16, so, what else is new? Obviously I don’t scan the editorial pages of more than a half dozen or so major newspapers daily.
But I can tell you it is not uncommon for there to be, at a minimum, four or five fusillades launched daily at President Trump in the Washington Post. And that doesn’t count a steady stream of columnists and entertainment reviewers and art critics (yes, art critics).
One other consideration. In suggesting a common editorial stance against Trump, The Globe writes, “Our words will differ. But at least we can agree that such attacks are alarming.”
What if you turned this around? You could argue—I have argued—that the major media has not only attempted to take down the Trump administration even before it took office but are exceptionally proud of their efforts. Think about that for a second.
Whether you love, hate, or have some middling opinion about President Trump, doesn’t it make you nervous that the editorial pages of the major media outlets have decided they will invest unlimited resources to destabilizing the Trump administration-to at a minimum make it impossible for the President to govern, at “best,” to bring his government down?
There’s a word for that, and only the press believes it is “freedom.”