7/2/17: Trump takes his war on a free press to a new low, posting a video of himself attacking a figure whose face is represented by the CNN logo. Supporters find the clip hilarious. Just what the Fascists ordered! CNN is “garbage journalism,” Trump tells rabid fans.
Emboldening “autocratic leaders around the world.”
The Committee to Protect Journalists, which works to safeguard reporters in places like Russia and Iran, fails to see the humor. “Targeting individual journalists or media outlets, on- or off-line, creates a chilling effect and fosters an environment where further harassment, or even physical attack [emphasis added] is deemed acceptable.”
Trump’s attacks, the group warns,
embolden “autocratic leaders around
the world.” (See: 6/8/17.)
___
7/3/17: Trump supporters continue to assail a free press. Newt Gingrich claims the media is “a danger to the country right now.” He stakes out this position on Fox News, which remains miraculously untainted by bias.
Wayne LaPierre, president of the N.R.A., who believes we need a gun in every hand, and one in every glove compartment for luck, and toddlers should be able to buy assault rifles, howls that “academic elites, political elites and media elites” are America’s “greatest domestic threats.” (See: 6/24/17; 7/1/17.)
(I am trying to remember the last time a college professor or New York Times reporter mowed down other Americans with an assault-rifle.)
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Hitler also promised to make his country great. Book burning event - 1933. |
__________
“The facts of life had become what Hitler and Goebbels, with their cynical disregard for truth, said they were.”
William
Shirer
__________
Maybe what the right really wants is total control of all media, to have Trump appoint his own Joseph Goebbels. Goebbels had power under Hitler to forbid the broadcast of stories that lacked government approval, to seize copies of newspapers that offended the Fuhrer, and burn “offensive” books for fun. The Nazis created a Reich Chamber of Culture to control what artists, musicians, actors, writers, reporters, radio personalities and film makers did.
As William Shirer explained in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich:
Every morning
the editors of the Berlin daily newspapers and the correspondents of those
published elsewhere in the Reich gathered at the Propaganda Ministry to be told
by Dr. Goebbels or by one of his aides what news to print and suppress, how to
write the news and headline it, what campaigns to call off or institute and
what editorials were desired for the day.
Section 14, of
the Press Law, passed once Nazis got control in October 1933, ordered editors:
…to keep out
of the newspapers anything which in any manner is misleading to the public,
mixes selfish aims with community aims, tends to weaken the strength of the
German Reich, outwardly or inwardly, the common will of the German people, the
defense of Germany, its culture and economy…or offends the honor and dignity of
Germany.
“The facts of life,” Shirer wrote, “had become what Hitler and Goebbels, with their cynical disregard for truth, said they were.”
Trump Heaven.
BLOGGER’S NOTE: By
November 2018, the president will be fantasizing about
creating his own taxpayer-funded network. In a pair of tweets, he explains what
he sees as the glaring need, “Throughout
the world, CNN has a powerful voice portraying the United States in an
unfair.... ....and false way. Something has to be done, including the
possibility of the United States starting our own Worldwide Network to show the
World the way we really are, GREAT!”
