News !!! Is Trump a DICTATOR  CNN host ATTACKS Donald Trump s media attacks
Channel: NEWS US
Date: 2017-02-20

CNN’s Brian Stelter: Donald Trump’s Attacks on Press Are ‘Verbal Poison’ Stelter said, “Poison. That’s what it is. It’s a verbal form of poison.” The CNN panel even compared Trump to Stalin and Hitler.

CNN’s Brian Stelter kicked off today’s Reliable Sources by criticizing not just President Trump‘s tweet calling the media the “enemy,” but his overall attacks on the press.

He said this may just be words and not actions, but “some of his actions are about the media” and they have an impact on the general public.

Stelter even brought up the Nixon comparisons people have drawn––given how the late president once called the press the enemy too––and spoke to Carl Bernstein about that comparison.

And if anything, Bernstein argued, Trump’s attacks on the press are “more treacherous” than Richard Nixon‘s.

Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein has attacked Donald Trump’s “lying” and said his attacks on the media are more treacherous than those of Richard Nixon, the president he helped bring down.

Bernstein, whose reporting with Bob Woodward and Ben Bradlee helped exposed the Watergate scandal of the 1970s, has told his 26,000 twitter followers: “The most dangerous ‘enemy of the people’ is presidential lying – always. Attacks on the press by Donald Trump [are] more treacherous than Nixon’s.”

Apparently questioning Trump’s mental stability, Bernstein added: “Real news (not fake) is that Donald Trump is trying to make conduct of the press the issue instead of egregious (and unhinged) conduct of POTUS [President of the United States].”

Bernstein’s tweets appear to be a response to Donald Trump calling his journalistic critics “enemies of the people”.

This itself followed a chaotic press conference in which Trump called the assembled journalists dishonest, accused a Jewish reporter of lying and ordered him to sit down, and told a black reporter asking about the Congressional Black Caucus: “Are they friends of yours? Set up a meeting.”

While the President’s press conference performance was widely mocked, his enemies of the people comment drew comparisons with despots like Stalin and Mao Zedong who had a habit of using the phrase about opponents shortly before they died or “disappeared”.

Trump is far from being the first US President to attack the media. As far back as 1807 President Thomas Jefferson was complaining: “Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle.”

Nixon was also notorious for his hatred of the press. He publicly raged against “distorted” and “hysterical” reporting, and in December 1972, while being pursued by journalists including Bernstein over Watergate, he privately told Henry Kissinger that the press was the “enemy”.

No US Presidents before Trump, however, are thought to have gone as far as publicly declaring sections of the media “enemies of the people”, and Bernstein has repeatedly alleged that Trump’s paranoia, attacks on the press and “factless madness” are worse than Nixon’s.

In December, after Trump had been elected but before he took office, Bernstein said: “No president, including Nixon, [is] so ignorant of fact and disdains fact in [the] way Donald Trump does. [He] creates/thrives in truth-free zone.”