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You’re attacking free speech if you use it to attack the media?

It’s tough to over-estimate the arrogance of today’s media.  While behaving like fragile victims, they keep telling us they are too important to be criticized.

The “legacy media” has long ago dispensed with any pretense that they are fair, unbiased or even truthful and they’ve gotten into a tizzy because Donald Trump is attacking them again.

President Trump accused the New York Times of committing a “virtual act of treason” for reporting that the United States is substantially increasing Cyber Attacks on Russia. He says that isn’t true and is concerned about the ramifications of such reporting.

Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger responded in a Wall Street Journal op-ed saying that Trump’s attack “crossed a dangerous line” for criticizing the press.  What I believe is much more dangerous is that they take themselves so seriously.

If we can’t criticize them, aren’t they guilty of the same authoritarianism of which they have accused the President with no facts or evidence?  Does anybody think there’s someone in America that’s not allowed to criticize President Donald Trump?  On the other hand, hearty attempts have been made to make it dangerous to openly approve of him lest you be called deplorable, a racist, or have your car keyed.  The media has been fully engaged in trying to bury him–certainly not to praise him.

I heard a normally reasonable Fox Reporter say that the reason it’s inappropriate to criticize the press is because we need them to decipher the news for us. There’s that arrogance again.  We used to need reporters to report the news for us, not decipher it.

Most of the American media has been colluding (yes, colluding) with the Democrat party to take down this President. They have advanced stories they knew to be false, protected people they knew to be guilty and I suspect, attended endless fancy dinner parties, clinking their glasses with others in the deep state to celebrate their growing influence over you and me.  Combine that with the disturbing power and control of internet giants who lean decidedly to the left and the legacy media including that Fox reporter are guarding the chicken house.

Trump is certainly guilty of hyperbole, but it doesn’t concern me nearly as much as the inability of powerful news outlets to accept criticism and to make even the slightest attempt to return to their journalistic roots. That they continue to hold on to the notion that they are beyond criticism is precisely why we should be concerned.

 

photo credit: The U.S. National Archives New York Times Advertisement, 03/29/1960 via photopin (license)

Karen Kataline

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