Quote:Trump: Mainstream media trying to get me to stop using social media
President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he uses social media to present his “honest an unfiltered message,” a tactic that he said the “fake” mainstream media would like him to stop.
The remark, made via Twitter, came one day after counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway criticized the press for having “this obsession with covering everything he says on Twitter and very little of what he does as president.”
“The FAKE MSM is working so hard trying to get me not to use Social Media. They hate that I can get the honest and unfiltered message out,” the president wrote on Twitter Tuesday morning. “Sorry folks, but if I would have relied on the Fake News of CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, washpost or nytimes, I would have had ZERO chance winning WH.”
In fact, the people who want Trump to stop using Twitter are the strategists and communications people around him in the administration and GOP politicos who aren't insane.
Even Trump himself has previously said, many times, that the media are profiting from covering him because he pulls in readers and eyeballs like nobody else does.
Probably, to some significant degree, this is Trump expressing his sense that he is being victimized by media which has learned long ago to mistrust him because of his constant lies and exaggerations. But it is also something else at work here. Something really very ugly and dangerous - the authoritarian/dictatorial demand that only HIS voice (or the voices of those who back him, like InfoWars or Fox) be attended to.
And with this demand, Trump is counting on (and helping to further foster) a very particular behavior from a very particular group of Americans. He is counting on a GOP-voting base, long primed to reject information which is inimical to GOP/modern conservative goals and ideas, to reject even more strongly and pervasively any information or commentary which criticizes Trump and his administration. This, of course, is what "fake news" and "the lying media" is all about.
Trump is taking this right wing attack on independent media to a new and very divisive, dangerous level. And he's not alone in this.
Quote: GOP strategists plot anti-media strategy for 2018 elections
BY ALEX ROARTY AND LINDSAY WISE
Conservative radio hosts mock a physical assault on a reporter. A GOP governor blasts a reporter on Twitter as "a sick man." The president accuses the media of being an “enemy of the people.”
This is not run-of-the-mill Republican criticism of the press anymore. It is now a deliberate strategy to help GOP candidates win elections fueled by public hatred of reporters.
“Does anyone want to see a reporter badly injured? No,” said Tobe Berkovitz, a Boston University advertising expert who advises congressional and gubernatorial election campaigns. "But there are some people who think this is their comeuppance: ‘You’ve been strutting around with no accountability and maybe you should be held accountable.’”
McClatchy
Notice that bolded sentence and how the term "accountability" is turned on its head and now means subservience to Trump's desires and modern conservative goals/ideas, no matter how whimsical, or how uneducated, or how negatively consequential. It means, here, that media must cease in questioning and criticizing the regime in power if that regime is Republican.
