New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger says he is worried about threats against journalists, even as his publication has all but ignored more than 500 attacks against President Trump and his supporters.
After meeting with the president this month, Sulzberger released a five-paragraph statement about the weekend meeting:
I told the president directly that I thought that his language was not just divisive but increasingly dangerous. I told him that although the phrase “fake news” is untrue and harmful, I am far more concerned about his labeling journalists “the enemy of the people.” I warned that this inflammatory language is contributing to a rise in threats against journalists and will lead to violence.
I warned him that it was putting lives at risk, that it was undermining the democratic ideals of our nation[.]
Sulzberger claimed he was responding to the weekend’s Trump tweets.
“Had a very good and interesting meeting at the White House with A.G. Sulzberger, Publisher of the New York Times,” Trump wrote. “Spent much time talking about the vast amounts of Fake News being put out by the media & how that Fake News has morphed into phrase, ‘Enemy of the People.’ Sad!”
Nowhere in Sulzberger’s statement did he offer any examples of these threats, which greatly harms his case.
If Sulzberger could offer an example of anti-media rhetoric resulting in someone being harmed, he would sound serious.
Instead, he sounds like the typical thin-skinned media elite using emotional blackmail and fake news to try to silence valid criticism of his failing and corrupt industry.
In fact, the establishment media overall could add some credibility to their complaints about rhetoric if they themselves were not running around firing off the kind of rhetoric that has ginned up an unprecedented wave of violence, threats, and property damage against Trump and his supporters.
For three years, the media have lied about Trump and his supporters, using every slur under the sun, everything.
In print and everywhere on television, we have been relentlessly smeared as racists, sexists, enablers of sexual assault, anti-woman, anti-immigrant, un-America… Trump supporters have been called “Nazis” on Morning Joe, unpatriotic by CNN’s Jake Tapper… Trump has been falsely accused by the media of being a Russian spy, unbalanced, unfit for the office, a unique danger…
The results of this dangerous and incendiary media rhetoric have been recorded in exacting detail by Breitbart News, a list of 538 incidents that include everything from attempted murder to harassment to threats to criminal vandalism to beatings…
One way in which the media have allowed for this violence is to look the other way, to downplay, dismiss, ignore, and even justify it in their own rhetoric.
We all watched during the Obama era as a nobody rodeo clown was personally destroyed by the media for the sin of wearing an Obama mask.
But in the era of Trump, the same media tolerate and encourage much worse sins, and then they whine and crybaby, calling any criticism of them “dangerous.”
One of the most telling parts about the Sulzberger interview is the news that to protect his employees, armed guards stand outside the offices of the New York Times.
Is it not fascinating that when anyone talks about offering the same protections for schools, which, unlike the New York Times, actually have been attacked, a primal scream comes from the Times and its media confederates in opposition to “guns in school?”
And yet, here is the New York Times protecting its own employees using the very safeguards they wish to deny America’s schoolchildren.
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Source: Breitbart
