Shep Smith: Journalists are not the enemy of the people

And I'm hearing you. And agree.

There's a lot of in-fighting at the Fox network. As trump's comments intensifies, real journalists will be exiting and Fox will be nothing but loud mouth, opinion only, spewing nothing but junk, network.

Fabulous, except for the fact that the president never said anything negative about a free press or the press as an institution. For the millionth time, I love the police as an institution, but there are bad cops.

For most of the past 19 months, President Trump’s war of words with American news organizations has been more of a one-sided barrage — at least according to the Boston Globe’s editorial board.

Trump labeled the news media “the enemy of the American people” a month after taking the oath of office. In the year that followed, a CNN analysis concluded, he used the word “fake” — as in “fake news,” “fake stories,” “fake media” or “fake polls” — more than 400 times. He once fumed, the New York Times reported, because a TV on Air Force One was tuned to CNN.

And last week, at a political rally in Pennsylvania, Trump told his audience that the media was “fake, fake disgusting news.”

“Whatever happened to honest reporting?” he asked the crowd. Then he pointed to a group of journalists covering the event. “They don’t report it. They only make up stories.”

Now, the editorial board of the Boston Globe is proposing that newspapers across the nation express their disdain for the president’s rhetoric on Aug. 16 with the best weapon they have: their collective voice.

The rally calls for the opinion writers that staff newspaper editorial boards to produce independent opinion pieces about Trump’s attacks on the media. So far, according to the Associated Press, 70 news organizations have agreed — from large metropolitan daily newspapers such as the Miami Herald and Denver Post to small weekly newspapers with four-digit circulation numbers.

The Globe’s appeal is limited to newspaper opinion writers, who operate independently from news reporters and editors. As The Post’s policy explains, the separation is intended to serve the reader, “who is entitled to the facts in the news columns and to opinions on the editorial and ‘op-ed’ pages.”

“We are not the enemy of the people,” Marjorie Pritchard, deputy managing editor for the editorial page of the Boston Globe, told the Associated Press, using a term Trump has used to describe journalists in the past.

‘‘Our words will differ. But at least we can agree that such attacks are alarming,’’ the appeal said.

The newspaper’s rallying cry was being promoted by industry groups like the American Society of News Editors.

The call represents one side of a debate about what the media should do in response to the president’s splenetic attacks on the press — or if the media should do anything at all.

On one side are people such as Washington Post editor Martin Baron, who told the Code Media conference in California: “The way I view it is, we’re not at war with the administration, we’re at work. We’re doing our jobs.”

Baron told interviewers that The Post would have approached a Hillary Clinton administration with the same aggressive reporting.

But in a conversation on Twitter, Jay Rosen, a press critic and journalism professor, said journalists’ defending themselves was consistent with the chief journalism aim of telling the truth:

“The problem, of course, is that there is war on the press being conducted by the president of the United States and his supporters. To say otherwise would violate a different commandment. Yes, it’s imperative to keep your cool. It is equally imperative to state what is true.”

Others have argued that there’s a moral imperative to speak up because Trump’s rhetoric can result in more than words being hurled toward journalists.

Some have pointed to the killing of five people who worked at the Capital Gazette in Annapolis as an example. The man charged with five counts of murder in the killings had a vendetta against the newspaper, authorities said. But critics have said Trump’s anti-media comments do not help.

“What’s clear is that Trump has made it a verbal open season on journalists, many of whom have felt the sting one way or another,” columnist Kathleen Parker wrote in The Washington Post on June 29. “For all of us ink-stained wretches, the hate mail is more vicious than ever. The death threats more frequent.”

Last week, New York Times opinion columnist Bret Stephens described Trump’s anti-media words as “incitement” and shared a threatening voice mail he had received from a blocked number:

“Hey Bret, what do you think? Do you think the pen is mightier than the sword, or that the AR is mightier than the pen?”

He continues: “I don’t carry an AR but once we start shooting you f—ers you aren’t going to pop off like you do now. You’re worthless, the press is the enemy of the United States people and, you know what, rather than me shoot you, I hope a Mexican and, even better yet, I hope a n—– shoots you in the head, dead.”

The Washington Post editorial board haspreviouslyresponded to Trump’s attacks on the news organizations, but it’s unclear whether it will participate in the organized response.

You have interesting thoughts but, I don't buy your argument nor do I think you proved it. Yes, news will try to make their news a little more exciting than merely reading a report, however, if they are telling the truth and it is verified which most of the time it is, it's not propaganda. Propaganda is twisting facts to mean something other than what it is for an agenda and CNN and the rest of them do not do that nor have you proved it. What I mean to say is (I am not as elequent as you and many others here) that I don't think there is some kind of weird conspiracy with mainstream news to distort facts for a particular liberal agenda. In my opinion the only liberal station I know which is comparable to Fox News is MSNBC; not CNN.

MOSCOW — From Moscow to Washington to capitals in between, the past few days showcased the way President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia nimbly exploits differences between the United States and its allies — yet also accentuated where he falls short.

President Trump had barely finished catapulting a belligerent tweet at Turkey on Friday, doubling the tariffs on its steel and aluminum exports to the United States, before Mr. Putin was on the phone with his Turkish counterpart, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Yet for all the strategic success Mr. Putin has had — including diminishing NATO and the European Union by bolstering populist governments in Europe as well as Middle East autocrats — one key goal has eluded him.

Mr. Putin has failed to persuade or pressure the West to lift successive waves of American and European economic sanctions imposed on Russia since its 2014 annexation of Crimea. In fact, the State Department threatened last week to enact yet another round of such measures, just days after the United States Senate brandished its own.

The European Union, some of whose members had signaled in the past few years that they were ready to consider granting Moscow some relief, has similarly held tough on sanctions, especially in the wake of the British government’s finding that Russia was responsible for an attempted assassination on British soil using a banned nerve agent.

The failure to make progress in freeing the Russian economy from the sanctions is a setback for Mr. Putin both at home and abroad.

Far-right groups and counterprotesters are expected to converge on the nation's capital Sunday, one year after a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, left one person dead and elevated racial tensions in America.

The "Unite the Right 2" rally is being billed as a "white civil rights rally" meant to protest "civil rights abuse in Charlottesville."

Sunday's demonstrations and the opposing rallies are taking place in an atmosphere of heightened racial tension. In recent months, anxiety over racial bias and racism has been exemplified in instances in which police were called on people of color for innocuous acts like napping in a dormitory common room, having a barbecue and going to the pool.

This week, NFL players in the first preseason games resumed their protests over police brutality against blacks by raising their fists, kneeling or sitting out during the National Anthem.

"We've always acted as if black lives never mattered, as if people of color never mattered," Susan Bro, the mother of the counterprotester killed in Charlottesville last year, told CNN's Anderson Cooper on Friday.

"We really have not treated people of color in the same way we ourselves want to be treated. And I'm calling b.s. on that."

As many as 400 people are expected to attend Sunday's white nationalist demonstration, according to the event's permit application submitted by Jason Kessler, the same person who organized last year's "Unite the Right" rally in opposition to the renaming of two parks honoring Confederate generals.

That event included white nationalists, neo-Nazis and members of the Ku Klux Klan. Participants are expected to gather at Washington's Foggy Bottom subway station at 5 p.m. ET before marching to Lafayette Square park, across the street from the White House, according to the permit application.

They won't be alone. A series of counterprotests are planned in Washington throughout the day, led by members of 40 anti-racism groups. The Shut it Down D.C. Coalition, for example, scheduled its own rally beginning at noon to counter "Unite the Right 2."

Black Lives Matter DC is hosting the "Rise Up Fight Back Counter-Protest" between 2 and 7 p.m., just a block away from where "Unite the Right 2" is set to take place.

In the past, similar far-right demonstrations have been dwarfed by counterprotests.

For example, at a a separate Ku Klux Klan gathering in Charlottesville in July 2017, where Klansmen were outnumbered 20 to 1, according to Charlottesville officials

Here is another one devoid of propaganda; from CNN.

At first I decided you should be the one to bring clips, but then changed my mind. So I opened up my news app and just went to the first one to grab my eye which comes from the NYT which the President has called the "Failing NYT". (I rarely watch TV news of any sort)

Quote:

MOSCOW — From Moscow to Washington to capitals in between, the past few days showcased the way President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia nimbly exploits differences between the United States and its allies — yet also accentuated where he falls short.

President Trump had barely finished catapulting a belligerent tweet at Turkey on Friday, doubling the tariffs on its steel and aluminum exports to the United States, before Mr. Putin was on the phone with his Turkish counterpart, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Yet for all the strategic success Mr. Putin has had — including diminishing NATO and the European Union by bolstering populist governments in Europe as well as Middle East autocrats — one key goal has eluded him.

Mr. Putin has failed to persuade or pressure the West to lift successive waves of American and European economic sanctions imposed on Russia since its 2014 annexation of Crimea. In fact, the State Department threatened last week to enact yet another round of such measures, just days after the United States Senate brandished its own.

The European Union, some of whose members had signaled in the past few years that they were ready to consider granting Moscow some relief, has similarly held tough on sanctions, especially in the wake of the British government’s finding that Russia was responsible for an attempted assassination on British soil using a banned nerve agent.

The failure to make progress in freeing the Russian economy from the sanctions is a setback for Mr. Putin both at home and abroad.

If this article was not biased, you would be able to read it and understand everyone's POV and interests involved, including Trump, Putin, and Erdogan.

Do you realize that there is so much bias against Trump and Putin that merely showing an interest in their true motives and thinking would be met by many people as a failure to take sides against them?

You don't have to be interested in taking sides with someone to want to understand their thinking and motives. I often want to understand the thinking and motives of the atrocity-perpetrators I read about in the news simply because it's so amazing to imagine that someone would actually come up with the idea to do what they do.

What the article you posted does is show how little adjectives, like 'belligerent' or references to nerve-gas assassinations are used to lead readers into subconscious assumptions about the people in question. As far as I know there have been no conclusive evidence linking Putin to the use of nerve gas, but that doesn't stop the press from insinuating he is behind them. In fact, the press relies A LOT on suggestion without explaining why a certain suggestion may or may not ultimately be true. They present facts without sufficient analysis to indicate where there is potential for other interpretation. I do read some good articles that explicitly acknowledge when evidence presented isn't conclusive but rather suggestive, but such acknowledgements happen a lot less often than the implicit suggestions of guilt with insufficient analysis to consider other possibilities.

More importantly, the media too often focuses on politicians, leaders, and other individuals at the personal level instead of analyzing and reporting on the bigger picture. When there are numerous people collaborating to achieve strategic goals, it is more difficult to do critical analysis than when there are specific individuals you can put the spotlight on. To really see what is happening in the world, however, you have to look at larger networks of activity.

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Fabulous, except for the fact that the president never said anything negative about a free press or the press as an institution. For the millionth time, I love the police as an institution, but there are bad cops.

I like the analogy you are using. One example of a bad cop would be Fox News host Sean Hannity. The only problem is Trump only believes the crap from the bad cops, who happens to be Sean Hannity and Fox News. At the same time Trump opposes all of the good cops. By the way, the good cops is the mainstream media. The good cops are CNN, MSNBC, CBS, PBS, ABC, and the mainstream newspapers. The problem is Trump refers to the good cops as fake news while referring to the bad cops as real news.

Trump is a bad cop himself who only respects other bad cops such as Sean Hannity and Fox News, because the bad cops will protect him.

Citing the CORRECT source...

"Mitch Albom: If a free press is the 'enemy,' then who is your friend?
Mitch Albom, Detroit Free Press Published 12:00 a.m. ET Aug. 5, 2018
Donald Trump
(Photo: AP)

So when the idea that the press is the “enemy” of America starts to float, we ought to be concerned. After all, you can name two other famous leaders in the last century who defined their critics as “enemies of the people”: Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and Chinese dictator Mao Zedong."

Our intelligence have concluded the Russians did use a nerve gas agent against those in Britain which is why the US has put new sanctions on Russia.

No I do not see it that way. Racism runs counter to functional society. If the paper were writing a news article about when Saddam Hussein gassed his people, would they spend a lot of time on why Saddam Hussein gassed his people? Isn't the fact that he gassed his people telling enough? White supremist are not equal to the other side of Black Lives Matter so spending time on them is equating them both equal when they are not. Let the Alt Right News advocate White Supremacy news. All this equalizing stuff is just trying to mainstream the racist views of White Supremist.

Your own words suggest you, a priori, reject points of view other than your own. That's certainly OK as long as you are asserting your own opinion, but to suggest that is entirely objective is ludicrous. Moreover you prejudge the innocence of advocates for Blacks and the guilt of those who do the same for whites. THAT is Racism.

The truth is that humans of all races are made of the same fabric, and that differences between them are most often based on individual characteristics, and in some cases differences attributable to culture