If the Trump regime is any good at anything, it is escalation. Wars, sanctions, tariffs, ever more portentous threats of more of these, and let’s not forget genocidal terror in behalf of the president’s Zionist benefactors: Donald Trump is always good to take matters recklessly in the wrong direction.
And let’s not forget the Trumpster’s attacks on the press and broadcasters, and by way of these his incessant assaults on the First Amendment. These escalated big time last week, when the president announced that CNN, MSNOW and Politico were no longer allowed entry into the White House.
Here is Trump last Friday on Truth Social, his digital bullhorn. I quote courtesy of The Case Western Reserve Observer:
“I am proud to announce that, effective immediately, I am banning Fake News CNN, MSNOW… and Politico … from the White House as a result of their constant ‘reporting’ FAKE NEWS. Media Outlets shouldn’t be able to constantly write or report FICTION and LIES when they’re covering the President of the United States, the Trump Administration or the United States of America. Other Fake News Media Outlets to follow.”
Trump’s war against media, U.S. and otherwise, is as old as his presidency, if it does not predate his arrival at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. But with this audacious move Trump opened a new front. You, correspondent McGillicudy, cannot come onto the White House grounds? This is purposefully provocative, if you ask me — a confrontation for the sake of confrontation.
The banned news organizations sued, as Trump had to know they would. The five television networks responsible for pooling live coverage of the White House —one network supplies and shares footage daily on a rotating basis — simply stopped covering the media-greedy president in solidarity with CNN.
This twist of the knife left Trump’s gaudily managed summit with Xi Jinping untelevised.
A federal judge ruled last Thursday in favor of the banned organizations by way of a temporary restraining order, but the White House complied with its reluctance on full display. On Saturday, when it was CNN’s turn to pool, the network was barred from Air Force One as Trump traveled to Knoxville to watch a University of Tennessee–University of Texas football game.
At writing, the four unbanned networks — ABC, CBS, Fox News and NBC — plan to resume pooling broadcast coverage while leaving the White House uncovered when it is CNN’s turn. Judge Timothy Kelly’s restraining order is good for 14 days from Sept. 24, its date of issuance.
Let us stay tuned, as they say. And let us take all due care to understand what is and is not at issue here.
Neither Side
President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hold a joint press conference announcing the U.S. peace plan for Gaza on Sept. 29, 2025, in the White House.
There is no standing with Trump on this one, as there never is when his solipsism tips into insanity. But to be perfectly clear straightaway, there is no standing with those Trump singled out and the media allied with them, either.
“There’s something wrong with a country that can allow people to write purposely negative stories,” our rotund leader said to reporters after announcing his ban. Well, there is, arguably, but they have a right to write them in our nominally free republic. There is something very wrong, no argument, when liberal-authoritarian media are the front line in an urgently needed defense of the First Amendment.
My thoughts went back to a piece Jim Rutenberg, The New York Times’s media correspondent, published in August 2016, just as Trump arrived in national politics and the liberal authoritarians in our midst were beginning their long-running freakout.
Here is Rutenberg’s lead under the headline, “Trump Is Testing the Norms of Objectivity in Journalism”:
“If you’re a working journalist and you believe that Donald J. Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalistic tendencies, that he cozies up to anti–American dictators and that he would be dangerous with control of the United States nuclear codes, how the heck are you supposed to cover him?
Because if you believe all of those things, you have to throw out the textbook American journalism has been using for the better part of the past half-century, if not longer, and approach it in a way you’ve never approached anything in your career.
If you view a Trump presidency as something that’s potentially dangerous, then your reporting is going to reflect that. You would move closer than you’ve ever been to being oppositional. That’s uncomfortable and uncharted territory for every mainstream, non-opinion journalist I’ve ever known, and by normal standards, untenable.”
As readers may recall, there was all sorts of pseudo-thoughtful baloney going around at this time, to the effect that the principle of objectivity must be replaced by “moral clarity,” that flimsy phrase liberals took up because it sounded better than “ideological allegiance.”
I simply could not believe how stupid practitioners of Rutenberg’s generation were as they indulged in all this. How could they miss the old adage, What goes around will come around? What were they professing if not a fatal loss of faith in the journalist’s place in the polity and a dereliction of his or her responsibilities—altogether a failure to understand journalism as an independent pole of power?
The Stain of Russiagate
Joe Biden, foreground, and son Hunter during inauguration of President Barack Obama, Jan. 20, 2009.
Rutenberg and all the apostles of “moral clarity” have kept their word: You have to give them this. Their coverage of Trump I, the four-year interim that followed, and now Trump II has been transparently loaded against this president, and Trump’s manifest egregiousness this past 10 years is no excuse for it.
Two examples. One, simply stated, is the Russiagate fiasco. We still live with the damage this has done, not least geopolitically. Two, there is the shameful coverup of the Biden family’s corruption before and during Joe Biden’s presidency.
Here I will note the concerted effort to discredit the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop three weeks before the 2024 election and media’s participation in the so-called weaponization of the Justice Department during Biden’s term in office.
Now we know what they mean by “moral clarity.” The bitter, very bitter truth these people cannot face is that Donald Trump has a clear case when he carries on in all caps about “FAKE NEWS.”
Trump is not the first, we must note, to play the access card when dealing with the White House press corps. One administration after another going back who knows how long had their innings in this game; the Bush II, Obama and Biden regimes, to keep the point to our century, certainly did.
At the horizon we are looking at a dysfunction that transcends the contest for power between liberal authoritarians — politely called “centrists” these days — and their rightist counterparts.
Mainstream American media long ago surrendered their sovereignty as that independent pole of power I mentioned earlier. They serve the late-phase imperium. Next to this reality, what we witnessed last week takes on the character of bickering in the upper reaches of power.
The reigning Russophobia, the mounting Sinophobia, the Islamic Republic as a dangerous Rogue state, the erasure of history and causality in the reporting of the Ukraine war, what amounts to a massive coverup of the Zionist regime’s crimes in Gaza, the West Bank and elsewhere in West Asia: None of this changes as the guard changes from Tweedledee to Tweedledum in Washington.
At issue last week, and for a long time before this latest confrontation between the White House and media, are the First Amendment — certainly this — but also the sequestration of power and the place and role of the press in the American polity. All three of these items warrant urgent address. This should now be plain.
But there is no grounds to leave these tasks to mainstream newspapers, magazines, digital publications and broadcasters, however they love to mount their high horses in a cause they long ago abandoned. You are reading an independent publication. It is in media such as this where any prospect of solutions to these crises lies.
Source: Consortium News.
