Trump Is Absolutely Right: The Mainstream Media is Our Enemy

Is it true, as President Donald Trump tweeted yesterday, that the media can be the enemy of the American people?

Absolutely.

A free press, as America’s founders claimed, is, in fact, indispensible to a free society. An ill-informed or misinformed people will not flourish, and will not remain free for long.

The whole point of a free press was to keep government out of the dissemination of news. Whenever a government holds a monopoly on the spreading of “truth,” you can be sure that it will be fake truth, not real objective truth, because everything will be spun or reported according to what best suits the government.

And yet that’s precisely how the media as we know it operates. Particularly when the government in office is one that the media likes. The last administration was given a free ride for everything. Imagine the position of Donald Trump if he used the IRS to shut down left-wing groups, or suggested the use of government force to silence people with differing views from himself on climate change or Islam. Imagine what will happen if terrorist attacks on civilians in the United States continue or escalate on his watch for eight months, to say nothing of eight years. The last president got unlimited slack, while this one gets nothing at all other than leaks, distortions and out-of-context deception designed to bring him down. It’s really nothing new with a Republican in office.

The overwhelming trend in today’s media is, and has been for decades, in favor of big government, statist leftism combined with appeasement and pacifism in military and defense policy. It’s for these reasons that their heaviest hits have been for people like Ronald Reagan, whose policies went against the biases of most of the people in the media. It’s the same dynamic now with Donald Trump, only the gloves are off (on both sides) and any fading remnant of pretense is now completely gone.

Fortunately, we don’t have a government-run media. Many on the left would like one, but Donald Trump’s presidency will make that more difficult for them than ever before. Alternatives are free to develop, and that’s happening all the time since the Internet came along. For years, Fox News put the brakes on the one-size-fits-all ideological suit the media imposed on the population, and now Breitbart and others have proliferated to counter the trend, as well. Long live competition and freedom in media. If that ever goes, we’re done.

The most remarkable thing about Donald Trump’s presidency so far, to me, is how decisively he has taken on the established media. I took the time to watch the entire 2 hours of his press conference on Thursday. Did you? If so, you might be surprised at how skillfully he stands up to the biased media reporters. Not many Republicans would ever be able or willing to do this. I noticed he spent most of his time with reporters the most hostile to his presidency, primarily at CNN, who has been open and explicit about its intention not to report news so much as to destroy him and – by extension – anyone who supports him. He seems to enjoy the challenge of pointing out the misinformation they spread, and he had these normally callous, petulant and arrogant reporters on edge like I’ve never seen them. No wonder the media proceeded to report on that press conference as completely different from what one witnessed, if one took the time to watch it.

Bill Maher and other stalwart Democrats keep saying that this policy of criticizing the biased media means Donald Trump is against freedom of speech. In what world do they reach this conclusion? All Donald Trump does is call the media on its lies, distortions, half-truths and errors whenever there’s someone who’s not a Democrat in charge of things. This is not objective reporting; it’s blatantly biased reporting. Bias seems like too kind a word when members of the media become openly committed to a particular president’s destruction.

People who claim that Trump is against free speech merely because he stands up to the dishonest and even bullying media completely obliterate the distinction between dissenting opinion and censorship. Disagreement and calling people on their deceit is not censorship. Confronting a media represented by probably 90 or 95 percent Democrats when only about half the country are Democrats does not constitute censorship. It’s a valid and entirely long overdue criticism, especially when coming from someone as high-profile as a U.S. President. It’s high time somebody stood up to the arrogance, dishonesty and eye-rolling smirks that pass for “objectivity” and reasonableness in journalism. Trump’s willingness to do so at times verges on the heroic.

Censorship only occurs when a government takes active steps, using government laws and force, to forbid certain speech from taking place. It seems that people on the Democrat-progressive side of things feel imposed upon, inhibited or even censored when anyone dares to challenge or disagree with them. Hence the crying, pouting, screaming, shouting, burning, and threatening to ban/boycott/shame and whatever else that we continue to witness on a daily basis.

They’re due to get over it. And the thing I like most about Donald Trump’s presidency, so far, is that he won’t take one bit of their toxic pretense that the vast majority of those in the media – CNN, CBS, ABC, MSNBC, HuffPost, all the rest – are anything remotely close to objective.

Here’s hoping he never does.