By JD Heyes
Last week POTUS Donald Trump tweeted that he had an “interesting” and “very good” meeting with the 39-year-old publisher of The New York Times, A.G. Sulzberger, whom he had invited to the White House for a discussion about the paper’s “fake news” regarding his administration.
The Times has allowed itself to essentially be used as a “presstitute” – a press prostitute – by Deep State careerists and apparatchiks who have been leaking to the paper alleged damaging information on Trump and his White House, much of which has turned out to be false.
For his part, Sulzberger used the opportunity to whine to the president about his labeling the press ‘fake news’ and other things – including how the press has become an “enemy of the people.”
In a five-paragraph statement following POTUS’ tweet, Sulzberger said he took the meeting to register his “concerns about the president’s deeply troubling anti-press rhetoric,” The Associated Press reported.
“I told the president directly that I thought that his language was not just divisive but increasingly dangerous,” Sulzberger wrote.
And while the “fake news” label is supposedly untrue and harmful, the Times publisher added, “I am far more concerned about his labeling journalists ‘the enemy of the people.’ I warned that this inflammatory language is contributing to a rise in threats against journalists and will lead to violence.”
Sulzberger, who attended the meeting with his editorial page editor, James Bennet, also claimed that other countries were using Trump’s rhetoric to justify crackdowns on journalists in their countries.
“I warned that it was putting lives at risk, that it was undermining the democratic ideals of our nation, and that it was one of our country’s greatest exports: a commitment to free speech and a free press.”
There is so much wrong and tone deaf about Sulzberger’s statement it is difficult to know where to start in refuting him. (Related: Anti-Trump NY Daily News fires half its staff.)
Democratic propaganda machine
First of all, nothing that POTUS Trump has said or done is ‘endangering press freedom.’ Calling out multitudes of primary news sources – the Times, the Washington Post, ABC News, and especially fake news central CNN– for publishing knowingly false information is appropriate. More elected officials (especially Republicans) should do so as well. And while our founders incorporated press freedom into our Constitution as a check on power, that goes both ways.
And when the press knowingly publishes false information as a means of angering and whipping a segment of the population into a frenzy – such as with a recent Time magazine cover depicting POTUS standing over a crying immigrant girl who was never “ripped from her mother’s arms” or a phony “Russia dossier” – how can they claim to be acting on behalf of the people?
When the press is responsible for angering a segment of the population to the point they are willing to use violence – even deadly violence– to attack another segment, doesn’t that at least make the media an ‘enemy’ of the civil society?
As for other leaders allegedly using Trump’s characterizations of our media as their “justification” to crack down on their media, that’s just absurd. Authoritarian leaders did not become authoritarian because of Trump, they did so on their own. And controlling the press is what tyrants do.
Finally, this allegation that Trump’s attacks on an establishment media that has been clearly exceptionally hostile to him as destructive of the First Amendment, please…POTUS Trump cannot arbitrarily change the Constitution or “ban” the First Amendment any more than he can change or ignore other parts of our founding document. Hating the fact that he and other members of the press are regularly called out by POTUS is not the same as seeing press freedoms destroyed.
There are easy fixes to all of Sulzberger’s complaints: Start doing journalism the way it was meant to be done and stop being propagandists for the Democratic Party. Simple.
Read more about the fake news media at NewsFakes.com.
J.D. Heyes is editor of The National Sentinel and a senior writer for Natural News and News Target.
Sources for this article include:
http://leftcult.com/2018-07-30-lying-left-wing-media-begs-trump-to-stop-attacking-them.html