The Boston Globe and more than 300 publications across the United States join editorial express "Journalists are not the Enemy" and that “This is one of the many lies that have been thrown out by this President.."
Thursday, August 16, 2018
Video and Words published by Savannah Evans on Aug. 16, 2018
VietPress USA (Aug. 16, 2018): The Boston Globe today
organized the National Free Press that joined by more than 300 publications
across the country -- most of which supported Hillary Clinton in 2016 --
participated in the effort to express to the American people and the world that
“JOURNALISTS ARE NOT THE ENEMY” as President Trump indicated.
The Globe’s piece,
published Thursday, titled “JOURNALISTS ARE NOT THE ENEMY,” said replacing
“a free media with a state-run media” is the “first order of business for any
corrupt regime taking over a country.” “Today in the United States we
have a president who has created a mantra that members of the media who do not
blatantly support the policies of the current U.S. administration are the
‘enemy of the people,’” the editorial board wrote. “This is one of the many
lies that have been thrown out by this president much like an old-time
charlatan threw out ‘magic’ dust or water on a hopeful crowd.” The
Globe’s editorial board wrote that press freedom is “under serious threat. And
it sends an alarming signal to despots from Ankara to Moscow, Beijing to
Baghdad, that journalists can be treated as a domestic enemy.” The Globe,
on Thursday, also changed its Twitter avatar to an image of a hashtag in red, all-capital
letters: #FREEPRESS. The Globe’s column was one of hundreds circulating throughout the U.S. on Thursday.
President Trump tweeted earlier
Thursday morning to criticize the Boston Globe and said that “THE FAKE NEWS
MEDIA IS THE OPPOSITION PARTY. It is very bad for our Great Country….BUT WE ARE
WINNING!” Trump has routinely mocked and attacked media outlets—like CNN, NBC,
The New York Times, and The Washington Post—over critical stories that he often
disputes. The tensions between Trump and the media, though, have
been flaring ever since the campaign. By one count, of the 100 biggest
newspapers in the U.S., 57 endorsed Clinton for president, four endorsed
Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson, and only two endorsed Trump.
Politico’s senior media writer Jack Shafer wrote in his own op-ed that
the coordinated editorial attack Thursday is “sure to backfire”.
Read this report from Yahoo News at:
VietPress USA News
Look back to President Barack Obama and American Press & Media at his final dinner:
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As newspapers unite to defend press freedom, Trump accuses them of 'COLLUSION'
President Trump on Thursday accused newspapers that are participating in a Boston Globe-led editorial campaign protesting his attacks on the press of colluding against him.
“The Boston Globe, which was sold to the the [sic] Failing New York Times for 1.3 BILLION DOLLARS (plus 800 million dollars in losses & investment), or 2.1 BILLION DOLLARS, was then sold by the Times for 1 DOLLAR,” Trump tweeted. “Now the Globe is in COLLUSION with other papers on free press. PROVE IT!”
It’s unclear what the president wants proven.
“There is nothing that I would want more for our Country than true FREEDOM OF THE PRESS,” Trump continued. “The fact is that the Press is FREE to write and say anything it wants, but much of what it says is FAKE NEWS, pushing a political agenda or just plain trying to hurt people. HONESTY WINS!”
More than 300 newspapers around the country published separate editorials on Thursday condemning Trump’s anti-media rhetoric.
“We have a president who has created a mantra that members of the media who do not blatantly support the policies of the current U.S. administration are the ‘enemy of the people,’” the Globe said in its editorial. “The press is necessary to a free society because it does not implicitly trust leaders — from the local planning board to the White House. And it’s not a coincidence that this president — whose financial affairs are murky and whose suspicious pattern of behavior triggered his own Justice Department to appoint an independent counsel to investigate him — has tried so hard to intimidate journalists who provide independent scrutiny.”
“News reporters and editors are human, and make mistakes,” the New York Times said. “Correcting them is core to our job. 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.”
While plenty of national newspapers took part in the project, many were local, and from states that voted for Trump in 2016.
“We aren’t the enemy of the people,” the North Little Rock (Ark.) Times wrote. “We are the people. We aren’t fake news. We are your news and we struggle night and day to get the facts right.”
Some prominent newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle, declined to participate.
“This is not because we don’t believe that President Trump has been engaged in a cynical, demagogic and unfair assault on our industry. He has, and we have written about it on numerous occasions,” Los Angeles Times editorial page editor Nicholas Goldberg explained. “The editorial board decided not to write about the subject on this particular Thursday because we cherish our independence.”
Goldberg predicted Trump would accuse newspapers of collusion.
“The president himself already treats the media as a cabal,” Goldberg wrote, “suggesting over and over that we’re in cahoots to do damage to the country. The idea of joining together to protest him seems almost to encourage that kind of conspiracy thinking by the president and his loyalists. Why give them ammunition to scream about ‘collusion’?”
John Diaz, the Chronicle’s editorial page editor, was equally prescient.
“It plays into Trump’s narrative that the media are aligned against him,” Diaz wrote. “I can just anticipate his Thursday morning tweets accusing the ‘FAKE NEWS MEDIA’ of ‘COLLUSION!’”
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