Just to make sure that at least those reading this thread on EO can understand the
actual accurate truth of the matter, here is the Feb 17th Tweet that caused CNN, the NYT and others to poops their pants:
The New York Times responded in fairly uniform manner along with the others (CNN, et al, plus most of the mainstream media not even mentioned in the Tweet) with
the headline of:
Trump Calls the News Media the ‘Enemy of the American People’
Well, that's a lie. And a pretty blatant one. But it certainly gets the message out there that they want to give the American people (because, "that's our job" [to tell the people what to think]).
Then they doubled down on that lie with the lead of the story by saying, "President Trump, in an extraordinary rebuke of the nation’s press organizations, wrote on Twitter on Friday that
the nation’s news media “is the enemy of the American people."
Later in the article they have the Tweet embedded, but they never actually address the Tweet in their written words, and instead stick to their own made-up, chopped-up, version of the Tweet. It would be so easy to quote the entire Tweet and simply address it, but chopping up the quote and addressing the chop better serves their purpose. Plus, every time they mention "fake news" in association with themselves, they are in effect admitting it. They're not gonna do that.
Because the media decided to use the chopped quote for their angle on the story, misleading the American people with a lie, Trump made it a point in his CPAC speech to reiterate what he said in the Tweet to make it mind-numbingly clear. He made it clear that he never said the "media is the enemy of the people," but rather that he said "FAKE NEWS media is the enemy of the people."
That's an important distinction of material fact the aforementioned news media chose to ignore, and went with this typical headline in response:
Trump again calls media 'enemy of the people'
So, they lied again.
And that's the narrative that gets picked up and placed on the lips of every liberal and anti-Trumper. It would indeed be scary if it were true. That's what dictators to, after all, they tell us.
Further, Trump said using anonymous sources when reporting the Truth is fine, but when anonymous sources are cited when reporting FAKE NEWS, it's a problem, saying (with regard to sourcing unnamed sources for FAKE NEWS),
"The fake news doesn’t tell the truth. It doesn’t represent the people, it doesn’t and never will represent the people, and we’re going to do something about it."
That "we're going to do something about it"
really pissed them off. Them's fightin' words, pardner. That's infringement of the press. You can't do that!
So now you have the false narrative of the press being the enemy of the people, setting up the context of "we're going to do something about it," yielding the narrative of infringement of, and censorship and suppression of the freedom of the press, when no such situation exists.
They cite as proof of that scenario: only the White House Press Pool (13 journalists (might be 12, I can't remember) that are assigned on a daily rotating basis to represent the entire White House Press Corps) plus 7 or 8 others were invited into Spicer's (relatively small) office for the informal gaggle. So, Trump is locking them out, cutting them off from information (despite the fact that the entire gaggle was recorded by the Press Pool and was then disseminated to the rest of the Press Corps, just like normal, just like it always is when the Press Pool is representing the larger group of journalists). They are reporting the gaggle as if,
normally, the entire Press Corps gets crammed into an office ¼ the size of the Briefing Room, which is already SRO as it is.
It's disingenuous, it's spun, it's agendized partisan reporting, and it's all fake. It's being a dishonest broker of the news.
To be sure, dis-inviting some of the regulars (CNN, NYT, others) from the gaggle was a "I'm mad as Hell and I'm not gonna take it anymore" shot across the bow, but because those same news outlets got exactly the same information that everybody else got, it doesn't matter one iota from a news and transparency standpoint. But it does let them know that they mean business when Trump says "and we're going to do something about it." Trump, Spicer and the others will continue to poke the fake news media in the eye with a pointy stick, and will do so in far more subtle (and infuriating) ways.
The Press thinks the First Amendment gives them the
right to be in the office of the White House Press Secretary. And isn't that funny. They don't even have the right to demand to be in the building. The Press has the right to print whatever they want, but they don't have the right to whatever physical access they want, whenever they want it. (They do, however, have the right to the
information of government business, and the government must provide that information.) The White House can't exclude certain members of the press from the White House because of what they write or who they write for (the 5-person group of the Standing Committee of Correspondents who approve congressional press passes could do that), but the White House can absolutely bar
all of the press from the building except when a press conference is called. When a press conference is called, that's is considered a federally-controlled public place, and any credentialed journalist must be allowed to attend (gaggles with the Press Pool, like in the Press Secretary's office or aboard Air Force One are not considered public places). All other access is as an agreed-upon courtesy.
