Unfreedom of the Press

by Mark R. Levin

  Porn actress Stormy Daniels and her attorney Michael Avenatti, who was recently charged with multiple felonies by prosecutors in New York and Los Angeles, became overnight media stars and appeared endlessly on news programs and in news reports; reality personality Omarosa Onee Manigault Newman, a disgruntled former White House staffer who was removed from her government job, was given numerous media platforms to promote her “tell-all” book about the Trump White House; Michael Wolff, whose writing was filled with references to anonymous interviews and questionable claims, was given numerous media platforms to promote his “tell-all” book about the Trump White House; Bob Woodward, whose writing was also filled with references to anonymous interviews, which earned public denials by present and former White House staff, was given numerous media platforms to promote his “tell-all” book about the Trump White House; and so on.

  And there is the endless press drumbeat about—or more like cheerleading for—President Trump’s imminent demise. As the Free Beacon’s Matthew Continetti put it: “The litany has been repeated so often that it’s easy to recite: The walls are closing in on Donald Trump, person x or y or z is going to bring him down, it’s only a matter of time before he is caught or exposed or loses his base of support and driven from public life. The phrases sound out from our cable channels. We see them in newspaper headlines and in our Twitter timelines. This time Trump has gone too far. The end is near. Take that, Drumpf!”15

  The press has been campaigning alongside Democratic politicians, officials, consultants, and surrogates for President Trump’s impeachment since even before his nomination. Jennifer Harper of the Washington Times has commented that “the press mulled the impeachment of President Trump even before he became the Republican nominee for president. That is a rough guide to how long the ‘I-word’ has been floated before the public. ‘Could Trump be impeached shortly after he takes office?’ asked Politico. ‘Impeachment is already on the lips of pundits, newspaper editorials, constitutional scholars, and even a few members of Congress.’ The date of that report was April 17, 2016; Mr. Trump only became the official nominee on July 19 of that year. . . . Journalists continue to bandy about the term with gusto, then posture on-camera like it’s a foregone conclusion. Many appear convinced that if they package impeachment speculation like fact enough, the American public will believe that the president should be shamed, blamed, defamed and shown the door. Democrats reinforce the effort with appropriate commentary, even as the persuasive press offers only scanty coverage of Mr. Trump’s authentic accomplishments.”16

  In fact, on one day in August 2018, the Media Research Center analyzed an eighteen-hour period on CNN and MSNBC and found that reporters, anchors, and paid contributors used the word “impeachment” an incredible 222 times. “MRC analysts examined all CNN and MSNBC coverage between 6:00 a.m. and 11:59 p.m. on August 22, counting every use of the word ‘impeach,’ ‘impeachment,’ or some permutation thereof. Analysts found 114 instances of the term on MSNBC and 108 on CNN, for a total of 222 total uses of the word.”17

  Now impeachment is reported as a foregone conclusion, with a long line of anti-Trump Democratic members of Congress, college professors, former Watergate prosecutors, Never Trumpers, etc., carefully chosen as news guests and commentators to provide the patina of “expert” opinion and “objective” analysis for President Trump’s impeachment.

  There was also nonstop media speculation about, indeed advocacy for, the indictment of President Trump by either the special counsel, Robert Mueller, or now the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York (SDNY), for a laundry list of supposed violations. Might the president be indicted for obstruction of justice resulting from his firing of former FBI director James Comey; his discussion with Comey about retired lieutenant general Michael Flynn; allegations in a discredited dossier funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee; a meeting at Trump Tower about which the president was unaware; alleged campaign violations said to result from nondisclosure agreements with Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal; etc.?

  Of course, two Department of Justice (DOJ) memoranda, initially dating back nearly half a century, explicitly provide that the official position of the DOJ is that a sitting president cannot be indicted. The Special Counsel’s Office was—and the SDNY is—bound by those memoranda as a matter of DOJ regulation. Therefore, the constant reporting—“analysis” and “interpretation”—seems intended by the Democratic party-press to build political and public support for the president’s impeachment. Indeed, in the end, Mueller found no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, and he did not seek any charges for obstruction of justice. More on this later.18

  But even the tone of the press in reporting on President Trump has reached a level of invective rarely seen in politics. The president is repeatedly referred to or impliedly compared to a fascist dictator, neo-Nazi, white supremacist, racist, Hitler, Stalin, or Mussolini in various news outlets and on media platforms by their journalists, paid commentators, and invited guests. These unhinged and shameful characterizations and rants are so numerous, they are easily searchable and profuse on the internet. However, a generous sampling, compiled by the Media Research Center, is sufficient to prove the point:

  • When Trump “goes out there and whips people up, it’s like a Mussolini rally. And yes, that’s what I said.”—MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, 3/12/18

  • “[I]t’s our responsibility to call out those times when constitutional norms are being challenged, those times when the president of the United States actually channels Joseph Stalin and calls the media ‘the enemy of the people.’ ”—MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, 3/8/18

  • “Donald Trump talks like a racist, thinks like a racist, makes statements like a racist. Conjures emotions that give succor and support to white supremacists and white nationalists. . . . He has emboldened white supremacists to come forward.”—MSNBC political analyst Michael Eric Dyson, 7/5/2018

  • “Our president is a disturbed person, and he’s behaving in ways that are simply inexplicable. . . .”—New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, 2/21/18

  • “The world witnessed a betrayal the likes of which we’ve never seen. America’s president sided with its enemy today.”—CNN host Chris Cuomo, 7/16/18

  • “[T]he spirit of what Trump did is clearly treasonous. It’s a betrayal of the United States. He threw our U.S. intelligence services, flushed them away and it came off as being a puppet of Putin. . . . [P]eople are going to say there’s the taint of treason around this White House.”—CNN contributor Douglas Brinkley, 7/17/18

  • “Well, if anybody is issuing demented words of violence and death, I would say it’s the president of the United States. I mean it’s quite a pass we’ve come to when the leadership of a country like Iran seems more stable and rational than the president of the United States.”—CNN analyst Max Boot, 7/23/18

  • “We got a guy [Trump] who gets up every morning and excretes the feces of his moral depravity into a nation he has turned into a psychic commode. That’s what he’s done. And he’s a bigot-in-chief and a racist in residence. . . . Look at this mendacious, relentlessly lying, bigoted, ill-informed person that we have.”—MSNBC political analyst Michael Eric Dyson, 6/4/18

  • “I don’t think he’s [Trump] capable of the basic empathies that we feel as human beings, and that’s what a sociopath is.”—MSNBC guest Donny Deutsch, 3/12/18

  • “This is not the party of Lincoln, the party of Nixon, or even the party of Reagan. This is the party of [Birth of a Nation film director] D. W. Griffith, this is the party of the KKK, and the party of Trump.”—SiriusXM host Karen Hunter on MSNBC’s Deadline, 2/26/18

  • “Article III in Section Three of the Constitution says this: ‘treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war against them or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.’ So, no president has ever been charged with treason. Douglas, do you believe
the president’s actions fall anywhere within that definition?”—CNN host Don Lemon, 7/17/18

  • “That is just the emboldening of white bigotry by a white nationalist, white supremacist presidency, and his cronies . . . and all the other white nationalists that he has empowered. . . . The emboldening of sort of your random white bigots and then the loosening of the grips on white terrorism in this country has raised the stakes for all of us.”—MSNBC guest Jason Johnson, 7/29/18

  • “ ‘What does Putin have on Trump? Has Trump been compromised?’ All of those people, those experts, those reporters, they are looking at the fact pattern and seeing something strange, even sinister.”—CNN host Brian Stelter, 7/22/18

  • “[I]t is astonishing how he [Trump] has become such an effective and destructive virus created by Vladimir Putin.”—Former Time editor Walter Isaacson, 7/23/18

  • “He’s inciting, through mass rallies and constantly lying, fervor in a political base. He scapegoats minority populations and affixes blame to them for every problem the country faces. He alleges conspiracies of nefarious forces. . . . [This] could be straight out of Munich circa 1928.”—MSNBC contributor Steve Schmidt, 6/26/18

  • Under Trump, “[c]hildren are being marched away to showers, just like the Nazis said they were taking people to the showers, and then they never came back.”—MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, 6/15/18

  • Trump’s detention centers at the border: “I call this a concentration camp for kids because that’s exactly what it’s turning out to [be].”—MSNBC analyst Michael Steele, 6/15/18

  • Trump “has very deliberately set up the press as the enemy of the people. . . . You know, this is something that we first heard from Joseph Stalin. This is very dangerous. It undercuts democracy.”—NBC News correspondent Andrea Mitchell, 7/30/18

  • Trumps’ administration follows “the exact pattern that Hitler has—I hate to say it—with the propaganda, even down to the Red Cross went into Auschwitz. They cleaned it up for two days—it looked fine—they went back—they said everything seems fine there. . . . To quote that new book that just came out, he is evil. He is evil.”—MSNBC producer Michele Reiner, 6/24/18

  • Trump “is completely detached from reality. . . . [P]eople close to him say is mentally unfit, that people close to him during the campaign told me had early stages of dementia.”—MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, 11/30/17

  • “Donald Trump is a racist. He isn’t just a white supremacist—he’s a flat-out, full racist. . . .”—former New York Times reporter David Cay Johnston, 9/16/17

  • “If you vote for Trump, then you, the voter, you, not Donald Trump, are standing at the border like Nazis going ‘you here, you here.’ . . . It’s a given, the evilness of Donald Trump.”—MSNBC guest Donny Deutsch, 6/18/18

  • “This whole administration . . . These guys are terrorists, right? . . . [A] white nationalist government that will take children hostage to get what they want.”—MSNBC guest Jason Johnson, 6/17/18

  • “This is the time for the Democratic base to roar up and say no more of this crap! . . . This is time for vengeance for what happened two years ago.”—MSNBC host Chris Matthews, 6/27/18

  • “He will be forever remembered as the president who traumatized little children. That’s his brand now. He’s the president, who purposefully traumatized babies and children and he traumatized them for his political gain or to look like Kim Jong-un.”—MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski, 6/18/18

  • Under Trump, “[w]e can imagine a future of jackboots crashing through our doors at 2 a.m., trucks in the streets to take people to the internment camps, bright lights and barking dogs—and worse.”—Politico chief political columnist, Roger Simon, 2/1/17

  • “Do citizens in dictatorships recognize what’s happening right here, right now? Are they looking at the first two days of the Trump administration and saying, ‘Oh, that’s what my leader does?’ ”—CNN host Brian Stelter, 1/22/17

  • “Is it time for newsrooms to think of new ways to convey Trump’s lack of credibility? . . . Because he says so many things that are bogus. . . . He tells us all these lies, he spreads all these falsehoods.”—CNN host Brian Stelter, 8/26/18

  • “Trump’s attacks on the American press as ‘enemies of the American people’ are more treacherous than Richard Nixon’s attacks on the press. . . . There’s a history of what ‘enemy of the people,’ that phrase means as used by dictators and authoritarians including Stalin, including Hitler.”—CNN commentator Carl Bernstein, 2/19/17

  • Trump is “not only not fit to be president. In my book, his lack of empathy, his lack of leadership, his lack of courage, he’s unfit to be human.”—CNN commentator Ana Navarro, 8/14/17

  • “We haven’t had a president this psychologically troubled in this way since at least Richard Nixon.”—former CBS News anchor Dan Rather, 6/1/17

  • Trump is “the chief recruiter and Dear Leader of a gang of domestic terrorists. . . . The president is the most powerful hate-monger in America. He is the imperial wizard of the new white supremacy. . . . He is our first neo-Nazi president.”—New Republic contributing editor Bob Moser, 8/14/17

  • Trump is “a sort of junior player in a block of authoritarian countries. . . . He’s part of the block that includes Vladimir Putin, Duterte, he’s you know, he’s kind of part of kind of an Axis Power. . . . He’d certainly like to” murder people without due process.—American Prospect senior correspondent Michelle Goldberg, 8/17/18

  • “We have a dangerous individual in the Oval Office who is a national security threat, and he needs to be removed from office. . . . He’s unfit, and he needs to be removed.”—MSNBC contributor Ron Reagan Jr., 5/22/17

  • “He’s unhinged, it’s embarrassing. . . .”—CNN host Don Lemon, 8/22/17

  • “We live in the age of the active shooter and the president is goading them. He is inciting them. . . . The blood will be on his hands the moment some whack-job thinks that he’s carrying out the instructions of a president and goes into a newsroom like the one behind us or the one in my news organization or yours and murdered people.”—New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, 8/6/18

  • “It’s hard to fire your son-in-law . . . but Mussolini had a great solution to that. He had him executed. . . . So, if I were Jared [Kushner], I’d be a little careful.”—MSNBC host Chris Matthews, 1/20/17

  • “There are a variety of ways that Trump could kill us all.”—MTV correspondent Jamil Smith

  • “The party of Lincoln has become the party of Charlottesville, Arpaio, DACA repeal and the Muslim ban. Embodying the very worst sentiments and driven by irrational anger, it deserves not defense but extinction.”—Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin, 9/4/17

  • “People are saying we have to talk about his health now before it’s too late. Eugene Robinson saying: ‘How long are we going to pretend that President Trump is fully rational? How long are we going to ignore the signs he’s dangerously out of control?’ . . . That’s the question. I’m going to ask you, Jeff Greenfield. Is now the time?”—CNN host Brian Stelter, 12/3/17

  • “How Murderer Charles Manson and Donald Trump Used Language to Gain Followers”—Newsweek headline, 11/20/17

  • “This is not a political party [Republicans]—this is a domestic terror group.”—MSNBC guest Fernand Amandi, 11/26/17

  • “How surprised should we be? This is at least the fourth mass killing in America using an AR-15 since the Las Vegas massacre. . . . At the center, an unapologetically incendiary president untrammeled by traditional norms of civility.”—ABC This Week’s host George Stephanopoulos, 10/28/18

  • “And I think what he [Trump] has done over the course of the last few years is help foment this” violence.—New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd on ABC’s This Week, 10/28/18

  • “The president is obviously a racist, he’s obviously a demagogue. He obviously condones anti-Semitism, stokes up nationalist hatred.”—NBC and MSNBC national affairs analyst John Heil
emann, 10/29/18

  • “I can’t even call him president, this demagogue, this nationalist.”—MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, 10/29/1819

  This media-pack malevolency toward President Trump and his party belies the press’s self-serving claims of professionalism and high standards; rather, it is every bit as tawdry, or worse, then the party-press “journalism” of the early 1800s, which they claim to frown upon. Indeed, during the Trump presidency, the press has engaged in lies, distortions, sloppiness, and overall malpractice to an extent previously unseen in modern times. At one point, the DailyWire kept a weekly tab of false media stories;20 The Federalist had its own list;21 ex–CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson maintains a running list of “media mistakes” during the Trump era;22 the Daily Caller kept a compilation of media “screw-ups” involving the Trump-Russia story; etc.

  A particularly notorious and pervasive illustration of press transgressions occurred on January 17, 2019, when BuzzFeed posted a headline screaming, “President Trump Directed His Attorney Michael Cohen to Lie to Congress About the Moscow Tower Project.” The subheadline declared, “Trump received 10 personal updates from Michael Cohen and encouraged a planned meeting with Vladimir Putin.” The crux of the story was that President Trump had directed Michael Cohen, his former lawyer and current felon, to lie to Congress about a real estate development in Moscow that, ultimately, never happened.

  BuzzFeed reported that “President Donald Trump directed his longtime attorney Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about negotiations to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, according to two federal law enforcement officials involved in an investigation of the matter. Trump also supported a plan, set up by Cohen, to visit Russia during the presidential campaign, in order to personally meet President Vladimir Putin and jump-start the tower negotiations. ‘Make it happen,’ the sources said Trump told Cohen. And even as Trump told the public he had no business deals with Russia, the sources said Trump and his children Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr. received regular, detailed updates about the real estate development from Cohen, whom they put in charge of the project.”23