Verified by 
“The first thing that dictators do is shut down the press” said Senator John McCain (R AZ) on Meet the Press last Sunday (Feb. 19, 2017). McCain continued: “If you want to preserve a democracy as we know it, you have to have a free and many times adversarial press.”
Suppressing the press was not the first thing that Donald Trump did on becoming president, but it didn’t take him long.
After a little more than one month in office, the Trump White has begun excluding respected news outlets like The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and CNN from its regular press briefings.
Trump claimed in a Tweet that the certain media, including the highly respected New York Times, were the “enemy of the people” because they print so-called “fake news” (news that the Trump administration does not like because it makes them look bad).
Less than a week after that Tweet, emboldened by the Conservative Political Action Caucus (CPAC), the Trump White House blocked several news outlets from attending a briefing. These outlets were CNN, The New York Times, Politico and The Huffington Post.
Make no mistake about it, this act is an attempt to shut down a free and independent press. It is unprecedented in the history of our Democracy for a president to shut out members of the press because it is critical of that president.
“Nothing like this has ever happened at the White House in our long history of covering multiple administrations of different parties,” said Dean Baquet, the executive editor of the Times.
Trump’s own press secretary Sean Spicer said in an interview with Politico in December that Trump would not kick news organizations out of the briefing room because they were critical of the President.
“That’s what makes a democracy a democracy versus a dictatorship” Spicer said in the December interview. Yet a scant two months after Spicer’s interview, Trump has done exactly that.
This step toward turning our free and democratic form of government into a repressive dictatorship should concern all our media and every reporter and blogger as well as every citizen who values freedom.
Update: Monday, Feb. 27, 2017 George W. Bush stands up for freedom of the press: “I consider the media to be indispensable to democracy” He continued: “We need an independent media to hold people like me to account. Power can be very addictive, and it can be corrosive.”
Copyright ©Marilyn Wedge, Ph.D.
