The press is not "the enemy of the people." But Donald Trump and his supporters absolutely ARE enemies of freedom.
It's also the term President Donald Trump uses for a free press. That should send chills up and down the spine of any American with a bit of common sense.
It's one thing for a person to be upset with news coverage that puts him in a bad light. It's perfectly reasonable for a politician to see news coverage of what he does and says as unfair; most of them do from time to time, and the media would not be doing its job if such were not the case. But to label a free press across the board as "enemies of the people" isn't just jumping the shark. It's jumping an ocean of sharks- and the First Amendment as well.
Giving Mr. Trump the benefit of the doubt and assuming that he really doesn't want the staff of CNN and the White House press corps taken out behind the building and shot in the back of their heads or even sent to the Gulag, his use of the term is still even more ominous coming from a man whose often incoherent but nevertheless chilling and quite direct threats to freedom of the press have been all too common. Throughout his campaign be bawled about how he (ever heard of the separation of powers, Mr. Trump?) was going to "change the law" to make it possible to sue news media that published "purposely false" stories. That in itself was scary enough; it proved conclusively that the man had no understanding of the First Amendment whatsoever. To allow the government to decide what is true and what is not would pretty much put paid to the idea of a free society right there; to allow it to decide not only that a story was false but that it was deliberately so would be an open invitation to freedom of the press being abolished entirely and the government stepping in and taking it over just like tinpot dictators used to do down in Latin America back in the day.
That in itself should have sent anyone who believes in the First Amendment and has a brain in his or her head to mark the man down as an authoritarian at best and a potential dictator at worst right then and there.
But unfortunately, there are plenty of authoritarians in America; as a study famously demonstrated during the Republican primaries, authoritarianism was the single personality characteristic most predictive of a voter's support for Donald Trump. It should be no surprise that so many of his supporters have no problem with demonizing the media for not being adoring of Trump's every word and gesture, or should be enthusiastic rather than apprehensive about a potential threat to the First Amendment, which after all represents a values system incompatible with their own.
So it's not surprising that Sen. Jeff Flake's eloquent and cogent speech on the subject of Mr. Trump's undignified and childish "Fake News Awards" should have been met with scorn by so many who love Mr. Trump and hate the fact that people who disagree with them aren't forced to toe the line. The liberal Democrats who make up the overwhelming majority of the media call them like they see them; the problem is simply that their sight is distorted in the same well-nigh universal way. The President, on the other hand, is a habitual and pathological liar who wouldn't know the truth if it bit him in the leg. To him, what is "true" is what heaps praise on Donald Trump. What is "true" is what he likes. Narcissists tend to have that problem.
And Donald Trump- authoritarian and supreme narcissist- cannot stand to be disagreed with or criticized. He believes with every ounce of his being that nobody should have the right to criticize or disagree with him, and that to do so is to become not only his enemy (paranoid though that thought is) but precisely "the enemy of the people." After all, is he not The People, personified? Are not his interests, theirs?
I agree that the liberal media, because of its overwhelming "progressive" and Democratic orientation, tends to twist the news. The few who don't are conservatives who twist it in the opposite direction, but for the same reason. But a free press can never be "the enemy of the people." On the contrary, democracy can't work unless it does exactly what Donald Trump can't stand to have it do: call our leaders to account, and provide an alternative narrative to those in power. The only people who cease to silence such an alternative narrative are tyrants and would-be tyrants.
It's our responsibility (as impatient as the president's supporters tend to be with civic responsibilities) to take human bias into account and to make allowances for it when reading what the media have to say. But it's even more emphatically our duty not to fall, as the President and his supporters would like us to, into sheeplike acceptance of everything The Leader says and an automatic disdain for any person or fact he finds disagreeable.
No, my authoritarian Trumpist friends. War is not peace, freedom is not slavery, ignorance is not strength, and we have not always been at war with East Asia! And the press, with all it's many and often serious problems, are not "the enemy of the people." To print facts which the president would rather not be true does not make one an "enemy of the people." To criticize the president does not make one an "enemy of the people." To hold the president to account- which is what Mr. Trump and his followers really find intolerable- is not to be an "enemy of the people." On the contrary, that's the job of the press in a free society.
But a president who uses that sort of language in an attempt to stigmatize all negative reporting, keep facts unfavorable to him away from the American people, and discredit any source of information he himself does not control is by that very fact an enemy of freedom and of the Constitution.
The only thing more dangerous than a leader who believes that he is above criticism and tries to make it stick is an electorate which goes along with him. The moment that happens, tyranny is born and freedom dies.
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