Attacks on the Media Reaching Dangerous New Levels [View all]
By RYAN BORT
Hours after calling legendary Washington Post reporter and current CNN contributor Carl Bernstein a “degenerate fool,” President Trump roused himself out of bed Thursday to levy another series of unhinged attacks against the media. Beginning just before 7 a.m., the president tweeted a whopping 10 times over the next three hours, with six of his missives aimed directly at the amorphous concept of “Fake News.” Once again, Trump described the press as the “Enemy of the People,” a phrase parroted by a California man arrested Thursday for threatening to shoot Boston Globe employees in the head. Also of note was a baseless allegation made by the president that NBC Nightly News anchor Lester Holt doctored the tape of the May 2017 interview in which Trump admitted that he fired James Comey as FBI Director because of the Russia investigation ...
Trump’s latest onslaught of attacks against what he believes to be inaccurate reporting come the same week the he erroneously tweeted that China was responsible for hacking into Hillary Clinton’s email server prior to the 2016 election. The tweet was based on an uncorroborated report from right-wing website The Daily Caller, which cited anonymous sources in its reporting. The next morning, Trump tweeted that when an outlet cites anonymous sources, “stop reading the story, it is fiction!”
... the White House regularly holds briefings in which officials are not permitted to be quoted by name, and Trump has long tried to manipulate the media by proffering himself as an anonymous source, which may explain why he believes people who refuse to go on the record — or at least the ones with unflattering things to say about Trump — are doing so because they are lying ...
... the FBI has denied Trump’s anonymous-source-based claim that China hacked into Hillary Clinton’s email server, citing that they have “not found any evidence the servers were compromised.” Trump, of course, has not removed the tweet.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-media-enemy-of-people-717346/
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