>>> Trump has long derided what he dubs “the fake news,” and he has famously called the press “the enemy of the people.” In the 10 years since he announced his first run for president on June 16, 2015, Trump has written nearly 3,500 social media posts that attack the press, according to an analysis by the not-for-profit Freedom of the Press Foundation.
Over the course of a decade, that’s roughly one per day.
But defenders of free speech have raised alarms about Trump’s recent lawsuits against media companies — which legal analysts have called baseless — and his willingness to use the power of the federal government to punish perceived adversaries. They see the unwillingness of Paramount and Disney to defend their First Amendment rights as a dangerous precedent that will only embolden Trump and his allies to push even harder against a free press.
“‘Attacking the press’ is too weak a phrase,” says Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. According to Jaffer, the goal of Trump’s anti-media efforts “appears to be to make the government the only source of information and authority in our society. It sounds crazy to say it because we have never seen this in American history.”
TODD SPANGLER
'Defeat the Press: How Donald Trump’s Attacks on News Outlets
Undermine the First Amendment'
Variety (16 julho)