Hostile media thinks THEY are under attack

Newsbusters:

As Monday’s throwdown in the White House press room made clear, relations between the President and the press corps are as bad as they have ever been during the Trump administration.

Most journalists seem to put the blame on the administration’s criticisms of the press, with CNN’s Chris Cilizza saying Press Secretary Sarah Sanders’ condemnations were “disheartening” and made him “angry.” A couple of weeks ago, disgraced ex-CBS anchor Dan Rather called the President’s attacks on the news media “disappointing.”

“If you look over the arc of history,” Rather lectured MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle in late November, “presidents who have been very hostile to the press have not wound up very good in terms of having their likeness carved into Mt. Rushmore or anything approaching that....You know that old cliche, if you’re in a hole, stop digging. In terms of his press relations, he just keeps digging.”

This week, Rather repeated his complaint to the Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart. “A free, a truly free and independent, fiercely independent press, when necessary, is the red beating heart of freedom and democracy,” Rather pontificated, saying of Trump’s attacks: “This has to be unacceptable.”

But as the Media Research Center has been documenting all year, the media have approached the Trump presidency with unrelenting hostility. Our latest numbers show that coverage of Trump on the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts in September, October and November was more than 90 percent negative (our methodology counts only explicitly evaluative statements from reporters or non-partisan sources).
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What I find ironic is Rather's statement about "a truly free and independent...press."  If they were any more free would their hostile takes on the President be at 100 percent?  What they really want is to have no criticism of their work, but that is the opposite of free speech.  Responding to what is perceived as unfair criticism is the essence of free speech.  Only in a totalitarian society would it be banned and that seems to be what the media is asking for.

A real attack on the free press would involve government officials taking control of their offices and shutting down their equipment.  There has not been even a hint of that by the Trump administration.