Enemy Of The People

So it’s come to this. The official White House position is that the press is the “enemy of the people”. Yesterday, Sarah Sanders was given multiple opportunities to refute that assertion. She refused to do so. And the President endorses that view at almost every campaign appearance.

Of course, this is just part of Trump’s authoritarianism and his desire to create the “managed media” environment that is a feature of autocracies. And it is obviously designed to deflect from and prepare for the coming onslaught from Robert Mueller.

And perhaps it is no coincidence that some new tariffs introduced by the Trump administration raise both the cost of paper and newsprint, putting an additional financial squeeze on an already stressed newspaper industry.

Those paper tariffs were at the behest of one US paper mill owned by a private equity firm. This complements the destruction of especially local newspapers in general, with the Tronc’s annihilation of the LA Times and the NY Daily News being the latest examples.

The media environment in the US has been and is undergoing a massive restructuring. But we are seeing the emergence of distinct propaganda outfits such as Fox and Sinclair that are filling the voids created by that restructuring. Combined with Trump’s authoritarian rhetoric that rages against critical media outlets and the almost universal belief among Republicans that the mainstream media is “fake news“, it is clear that our free press is under attack like never before.