President Donald Trump’s attacks on the media have gone beyond the usual partisan politics of the last several weeks.
The media has been at the center of the Trump administration’s latest misadventure, and the president is going to continue to take it on.
The stakes are very high for the press in the Trump era.
That’s because the media is responsible for the most important decisions in our lives.
The Trump administration has shown its disdain for the First Amendment and the media in general, but the media has also been the most effective source of information about the president and his policies.
And in the absence of a concerted media push to make the administration’s policies clear, there’s little the Trump team can do about it.
So, the media should have no problem being in the position of having to defend the president against these attacks, and should have ample justification to do so.
The American people, in turn, should have little problem supporting the press and the American people.
For the first time since the First World War, the public is demanding that the media be held accountable for its decisions.
In addition to a public interest defense fund for journalists, and increased funding for investigative reporting, the Trump White House is promising a $100 million public diplomacy effort to “strengthen the capacity of the press to report the news.”
That’s not a new idea, of course.
The U.S. is one of only three countries in the world that does not have a press freedom law, and its media rights are generally underappreciated.
But Trump has demonstrated that he’s willing to go out of his way to undermine the press’s independence.
The press has repeatedly said that he has threatened it with legal action, but nothing has come of that.
Instead, the White House has used the media to advance its agenda.
The administration’s decision to shut down a press conference on Thursday by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, who are both members of the administration, is the latest example.
The president had repeatedly promised the media that it would not be allowed to cover the inauguration.
In a speech on Wednesday, he said that the press should not have to “take sides” about the inauguration because “nobody’s taking sides” and that “we have a very free press.”
In the aftermath of Trump’s press conference, Tapper called the move “a stunning assault on the press.”
And on Friday, the Washington Post’s Philip Bump called it a “flagrant assault on our democracy.”
The president’s assault on journalists is the height of a pattern of threats against them.
For weeks, he has attacked reporters, editors, and reporters covering his administration.
And since the beginning of February, he’s attacked journalists on Twitter and in a series of tweets on Tuesday, he called journalists “a disgrace to the press” and “a bunch of liars” and told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that he should “beat their hoes.”
The attack on the U.K. newspaper The Daily Mail on Friday accused The New York Times of “shamelessly lying about” the contents of a letter the president sent to the newspaper.
The letter, which was published on The Times’ website, said Trump would not accept a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning his administration’s treatment of North Korea.
“It was published by a newspaper that is owned by Rupert Murdoch,” the president tweeted on Thursday.
“If they don’t want you to know what the president has said, they can just lie about it.”
The Trump campaign has also made threats to cut off payments to the U,K.
press.
In February, the administration announced it was severing funding for the paper’s annual journalism awards and had threatened to cut them off unless the paper did not publish articles critical of the president.
In April, the president ordered the suspension of the American Journalism Council, a program that awards scholarships to journalists, because it had not published an opinion piece on the president’s policies.
On Wednesday, The Times issued a statement saying that it had been “taken out of the equation,” and that the White, House had “no plans to stop funding the American Journalists Council.”
Trump’s threats have not only been aimed at the media, but at journalists at large.
For example, on Wednesday night, the Associated Press reported that Trump’s White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, had threatened the news organization with legal consequences.
“I think we’re going to have to have a whole lot of legal battles over the next few months over whether we’re violating our constitutional rights,” Spicer said, according to a video of the meeting obtained by the AP.
The White House’s actions against the press have also caused the press organization to lose valuable members.
The Associated Press has been one of the few institutions to offer a paid position to Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
The AP is now in negotiations with Trump’s former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, and White House senior adviser, Kell
