President Donald Trump is opening yet another front in his war on the free press, columnist Brian Karem wrote for Salon on Friday — and it's getting harder to overlook his true vision for the media.
"In the latest round of professional malfeasance, the president’s sycophants in the communications office have launched a 'Media Bias Portal' on the official White House website," wrote Karem.
"They are encouraging people to give them 'tips' when the public believes a member of the press has produced 'Fake News.' Naturally, I took the opportunity to fill out the page and offered the White House a tip that its own communication staff is publishing 'fake news.' I wonder how long I’ll be waiting for a response."
All of this comes as Trump's Department of Defense, which he declared to be the "Department of War" through an executive order, kicks off with a "press corps" of right-wing bloggers because all reputable media outlets, even most right-leaning ones, bailed rather than abide by the agency's new terms limiting their ability to report.
The New York Times is currently suing over those new restrictions.
"Trump is now in the end stages of his campaign to destroy free speech, independent media and all forms of dissent," wrote Karem. "He’s like the WWE Undertaker in the White House — which fits the bill nicely since the head of his communications staff, Steven Cheung, formerly worked with the WWE and loves to play the bully with members of a young and inexperienced press corps. Trump’s entire communications staff, come to think of it, is unpredictable, inattentive, arrogant, uninformed and anti-American."
In Trump's last administration, the press often pushed back when Trump moved to attack, demean, or strip them of rights, wrote Karem — but this time the protests are a lot weaker, and there's a reason for that.
"Trump has engineered an inexperienced, sycophantic press corps. It’s handicapped from the moment reporters begin asking him questions, and Trump gets bolder, less professional and increasingly confrontational every time he appears before a pool spray, largely because of his success in undermining the Fourth Estate," wrote Karem.
And Democratic lawmakers around the country are starting to take notice, he said: Rep. Jake Auchincloss (D-MA) introduced a package of reforms to combat misinformation online while taxing ad revenue from big tech platforms, and multiple states, including New Jersey and Pennsylvania, have either passed or are debating measures to give public funding to local news, putting those reporters on stronger footing.
In the meantime, though, he concluded, the press needs to remember that they don't work for the president.
"The White House press corps I worked with, after I walked into the briefing for the first time in 1985, rarely failed to call presidents out in public," he wrote. "That’s part of the job. Of course we must show respect for the office. But we should not have to stand for a president demeaning us, insulting us, refusing to interact with us and failing to recognize why we’re there. It’s not the press who are being insubordinate. He is. We’re not the enemy of the people. He is."