It makes me sad to have to say it, but since President Trump wants to take a dump on the press in the best Nixonian tradition, I think it needs to be said.
One of the absolutely most important tools of a free people is information, full & complete. Not what’s convenient to their biases, left or right, but as complete as possible.
So when President Trump pronounces,
I also want to speak to you without the filter of the fake news. The dishonest media which has published one false story after another with no sources, even though they pretend they have them, they make them up in many cases, they just don’t want to report the truth and they’ve been calling us wrong now for two years.
he’s talking about news organizations that dare to call him out on verifiable lies – by claiming they don’t have the sources. But they do, they’re more than willing to make them available.
So here’s the struggle for the heart and soul of the United States – good information, and the willingness to act. For President Trump, his actions betray his greatest enemy – accurate information about himself. The free press, the media, finds itself under attack from two sides. The first is a President who, with no training and no apparent ideas as to the role of the press in the nation, cries out in anger every time he is found out. Truth has nothing to do with him, it slipped out of his car in the dead of the night. And now he assaults the free press, a press that has saved this nation countless times over the centuries, he assaults one of our pillars.
Second, a lesser, but more subtle attack is mounted by the ownership of the press. Let’s face it, it takes a special ownership of a news organization to do it right: not to slant the news, not to strip context from news they don’t like, to just investigate, investigate, investigate, and then present it so the audience can judge. We know, from Bruce Bartlett’s investigations, that Fox News has failed that test. I suggest another approach to detecting such news organizations is to search for Trump endorsements, and know them as big red flags.
This is one of the most important issues facing American citizens today, and if you’re a conservative who is considering taking the President seriously, then be serious about it. Ask about it! Ask for specific examples, and ask for a hundred of them! If the White House won’t respond, ask the local GOP. If they won’t deliver, either, then there’s your answer. Walk away.
But if they do, good! Now follow through and check them. Call up your friends, divide up the allegations, and follow through. Did the mainstream media really make all this shit up?
But if they don’t, do you have the honesty to call him on it? Or are his promises too alluring still?
