Saturday 25 February 2017

Trump bans BBC, CNN, New York Times, Politico

Actually it wasn't Trump specifically but his spokesman Sean Spicer who blocked them from a post-CPAC briefing in his office. In their place he allowed Breitbart in. Breitbart! My god that's crazy!
But, get this: the move was so outlandish that even Fox News is criticizing it! Fox also joined in a letter of protest sent to Spicer by the White House Press Association.
It may help that O'Reilly's show is hosted this morning by Chris Wallace and comment is by Bernie Goldberg, both decent and fair men.
Trump has not only reiterated the "press are enemies of the people" meme, but he's also demanded that press reveal names of sources in any story. No one to be anonymous any more. Yeah, right. That's not going to run. Imagine how long such an identified poor sap would last.
This is not so much like Germany in the 1930s as so many are saying. It's more like China. And they way they control the media.
Had it not been for Deep Throat, we would never have known about Watergate. Or about Flynn's possibly illegal pre-inauguration discussions with the Russian ambassador.
And the people need to know these things. That's what the press is there for. And they are included in the constitution for that purpose.
Meantime, in place of CNN, BBC, etc, Spicer let in Breitbart and Washington Times.
Breitbart is too crazy right-wing, too Muslim-hating, too anti-immigration even for me. It's awash in clearly fake news.
Preferring them to BBC is batshit crazy.
And that's Spicer. And that's Trump.