Over 350 Newspapers Blast Trump Attacks on Press

Date: 17 August 2018 - 22:10

News ID: ۵۶۴۲۸

LOS ANGELES (Dispatches) -- Hundreds of U.S. newspapers devoted print space on Thursday to a coordinated defense of press freedom and a rebuke of President Donald Trump for saying some media organizations are enemies of the American people.
The Boston Globe and the New York Times took part in the push along with more than 350 other newspapers of all sizes including some in states that Trump won during the 2016 presidential election.
The Globe said it coordinated publication among the newspapers and carried details of it on a database on its website.
Each paper ran an editorial, which is usually an unsigned article that reflects the opinion of an editorial board on a particular subject and is separate from the news and other sections in a paper.
The Globe's editorial accused Trump of carrying out a "sustained assault on the free press."
"To label the press 'the enemy of the people' is as un-American as it is dangerous to the civic compact we have shared for more than two centuries," the Globe's editorial said.
Trump has frequently criticized journalists and described news reports that contradict his opinion or policy positions as fake news.
In February 2017, for example, he tweeted that "The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American people!"
The New York Times editorial said it is right to criticize the news media for underplaying or overplaying stories or for getting something wrong in a story.
"News reporters and editors are human, and make mistakes. Correcting them is core to our job," it said. "But insisting that truths you don't like are 'fake news' is dangerous to the lifeblood of democracy. And calling journalists the 'enemy of the people' is dangerous, period."
In January, U.S. Senator Jeff Flake, a Republican from Arizona, said Trump had embraced the despotic language of former Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.
"The true enemies of the people – and democracy – are those who try to suffocate truth by vilifying and demonizing the messenger,” the Des Moines Register in Iowa wrote.
In St. Louis, the Post-Dispatch called journalists "the truest of patriots.” The Chicago Sun-Times said it believed most Americans know that Trump is talking nonsense.
The Fayetteville Observer said it hoped Trump would stop, "but we’re not holding our breath.”
"Rather, we hope all the president’s supporters will recognize what he’s doing – manipulating reality to get what he wants,” the North Carolina newspaper said.
Trump, however, was unrepentant. He took to Twitter Thursday morning to denounce the effort, saying the Globe was in collusion with other newspapers.
He wrote: "THE FAKE NEWS MEDIA IS THE OPPOSITION PARTY. It is very bad for our Great Country ... BUT WE ARE WINNING!”
Newspaper editorial boards overwhelmingly opposed Trump’s election in 2016. Polls show Republicans have grown more negative toward the news media in recent years: Pew Research Center said 85 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said in June 2017 that the news media has a negative effect on the country, up from 68 percent in 2010.