Reporters Fear Attacks From Trump’s Fake ‘Fake News’ War On The Press (VIDEO/TWEETS)

By
Darrell Lucus
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Donald Trump hates the media. Really, really, really hates the media. That’s been clear almost from the time he descended the escalator at Trump Tower to begin his presidential campaign two years ago. He’s driven the point home every chance he can get since taking office. Either himself or through his underlings, he has told the press that they should just shut up, and warned them not to tell the truth lest they endanger democracy. He has also called for the firing of any reporters who were critical of him during the campaign, and has declared the media to be “the enemy of the American people.”

But New York Times media columnist Jim Rutenberg believes, with good reason, that the White House’s open hostility toward the press has gone to another level. In a column that ran in Thursday’s edition, he argues that Trump’s attacks on the press aren’t just frightening–they’re dangerous.

Rutenberg was alarmed when Trump claimed reporters were “trying to take away our history and our heritage” and mused that they “don’t like our country”–so therefore, they were “sick people.” In case you missed it, watch here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_Us0q-Lbeo

To Rutenberg’s mind, this was yet more evidence that Trump was directly contributing to what he called “the worst anti-press atmosphere I’ve seen in 25 years of journalism.” Even if no direct government action ensues–such as threats to punish leaks–Rutenberg still believes there’s reason to be unnerved about Trump’s incendiary rhetoric.

“(T)o dismiss Mr. Trump’s rhetoric would be to disregard the risk of violence that comes with the kind of presidential incitement we saw Tuesday night. It would also mean disregarding an element of presidential leadership that we are all taught in grammar school: its broad influence — how it can set a tone for others to follow.”

Rutenberg isn’t the only one who was unnerved by that speech. So was Jim VandeHei of Axios.

VandeHei subsequently told Rutenberg that he believed Trump was “playing recklessly with fire” while tensions were still very high in the wake of the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia. VandeHei believes that by effectively calling the media anti-American and unpatriotic, Trump has put journalists at “real risk for retribution and violence” from pro-Trump sans-culottes.

VandeHei isn’t just speaking in the abstract. There has been a considerable spike in what Rutenberg calls “a new brand of anti-media vigilantism.” It actually started during the campaign, when reporters who wrote stories even remotely critical of Trump were bombarded with graphic death threats from pro-Trump thugs. More recently, right-wing pseudojournalists Charles C. Johnson and Mike Cernovich announced separate projects to target journalists who, in Johnson’s words, “don’t behave properly.”


A slightly less sophisticated, but no less unnerving, case of “vigilantism” happened earlier this week at ProPublica. Last weekend, ProPublica ran an article detailing how technology companies helped finance extremist sites. On Tuesday, ProPublica was the target of a DoS attack on its email server. Online trolls began bombarding the email accounts of several of the reporters who worked on that story with bogus email subscriptions, effectively rendering their accounts unusable.

One of the reporters, Julia Angwin, detailed the attack in real time.

According to ProPublica president Richard Tofel, the attacks completely disabled ProPublica’s email system for almost six hours on Tuesday. He believes it was a crude attempt to “prevent these people from doing their jobs.”

We at Liberal America suspect that we were targeted in similar fashion last month. On July 17, a number of liberal blogs had their pages blasted off Facebook without warning for 48 hours or longer–including ours. We believe that pro-Trump trolls gamed Facebook’s algorithm by reporting several posts as fake news all at once.

You may know that Facebook faced harsh criticism that it didn’t do enough to keep fake news from gaining traction during the campaign. In response, Facebook has made it easy to report suspected fake news posts with one click or tap. But we believe that it has made it all too easy for trolls acting in Trump’s name to bludgeon Trump critics into silence by simply mass-reporting posts and getting the pages deleted. This is yet another instance of how actual fake news peddlers like LifeZette, TruNews, Infowars, Western Journalism, Conservative Tribune, Planet Free Will, and others are–at least indirectly–making it harder for legitimate bloggers on both sides of the aisle.


These sans-culottes seem to be acting out of an extremely twisted sense of patriotism. After all, Trump has consistently attacked the media as unpatriotic. On paper, it isn’t working. After all, at last count, the media’s repuation seems to be holding up even after several months of relentless bleating, screeting, and tweeting from Trump. But it’s cold comfort to reporters who are getting trolled on Twitter, or are getting their email accounts clogged up, or are seeing their Facebook pages trolled into oblivion. This sort of environment may be par for the course in, say, Russia or Venezuela. It shouldn’t be normalized here.

(featured image courtesy Michael Vadon, available under a Creative Commons BY-SA license)

Darrell Lucus
Darrell is a 30-something graduate of the University of North Carolina who considers himself a journalist of the old school. An attempt to turn him into a member of the religious right in college only succeeded in turning him into the religious right's worst nightmare--a charismatic Christian who is an unapologetic liberal. His desire to stand up for those who have been scared into silence only increased when he survived an abusive three-year marriage. You may know him on Daily Kos as Christian Dem in NC. Follow him on Twitter @DarrellLucus or connect with him on Facebook. Click here to buy Darrell a Mello Yello.

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