The Trump rally in Tampa, Florida, on Tuesday night is still sending shockwaves throughout the media (and he had another rally tonight, in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, with a third this week to follow over the weekend).
The liberal ladies on “The View” were appalled Wednesday that die-hard supporters of President Donald Trump aimed some vitriol at CNN reporter Jim Acosta.
“Calling the media the enemy of the people seems to be resonating with the new guy’s base, as CNN’s Jim Acosta found out last night,” said co-host Whoopi Goldberg, referring to the Acosta hecklers.
Co-host Sunny Hostin argued the president bashes the press because he “doesn’t like that the truth is being reported.”
Hostin compared Trump’s attacks on the media to those of a dictator — yet she defended the mainstream media.
“They need to keep on doing their jobs, and their jobs are to report the facts,” she said.
“And I think that’s one of the reasons why this president has started this war against the media, because he doesn’t like that the truth is being reported,” she claimed. “And I think that means that as journalists you have to continue to do so. These are the acts, in my opinion, of a dictator. Dictators attack the press routinely.”
As a point of fact, dictators have the full backing of the press in the majority of cases. That is because there is no press freedom, since the government is dictating what is being said and written — hence the term “dictatorship.”
When the press has 90 percent negative coverage of the most powerful man in the country, that is a sign of a free press. It’s also a sign of an unhealthy obsession with distorting the news to fit a resistance agenda. What is actually causing a restriction of free speech and freedom of the press isn’t any official policies out of the Trump White House at all. Instead, it has a lot to do with social media platforms’ policies, which selectively silence conservative publishers.
White House press secretary Sarah Sanders attempted to tamp down media blowback about the Tampa rally on Tuesday night.
“While we certainly support freedom of the press,” Sanders said Wednesday, “we also support freedom of speech. And we think that those things go hand in hand.”
That wasn’t enough to dial back the outrage about the president’s defiant stance toward the mainstream media.
“Menacing the media was a theme of Mr. Trump’s campaign rallies in 2016. News networks hired security guards for some correspondents — a practice that, in Mr. Acosta’s case, has continued — and reporters found themselves taunted and disparaged by attendees repeating Mr. Trump’s refrain of ‘fake news,'” The New York Times postured.
“You have to have respect on both sides. You have to respect average Americans coming to these Trump rallies for whatever reason.”
“In Tampa, though, several journalists described an atmosphere of hostility that felt particularly hard-edge,” the publication added.
The mainstream press had very little to say about former President Barack Obama’s slamming of Fox News as “destructive,” and his attacking of conservative radio hosts such as Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity.
Related: White House Aide Shuts Down CNN’s Jim Acosta in Epic Fashion
Co-host Meghan McCain of “The View” reproved Hostin’s remark by pointing out the need for mutual respect.
“You have to have respect on both sides,” she said. “You have to respect average Americans coming to these Trump rallies for whatever reason.”
She continued, “And when you’re mocking them at the same time, the war — which you just used that term —there are two sides to this; Americans in the middle of the country feel like the press don’t respect them. And that exacerbates that.”
Check out this video of their exchange:
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