Everything – Everything! – American presidents have problems with the press.
They do not like journalists, whip parkers, and although journalists can sometimes love them, they must try to hide such feelings, like what they – we are really after is a scoop. And these days, it is entirely a bad shape in the editorial room to confront a politician, whether this president is a liberal barack Obama or a conservative George W. Bush.
The current president, Donald Trump, is neither liberal nor conservative. He is a unique narcissist of a kind which, in a previous life, has made a commercial career by putting up to various journalists in the pursuit of the promotion of dreams of real estate domination of New York. He would literally call a number of scribes, pretending to be someone else with hot advice on something, anything, who would make his fortune from top to bottom.
And now, the more pity, he is again the president, pretending to be the moment to see the newspapers which once made his bacon as the enemy of the people.
It has been 65 years since an elected president who had cordial relations with the American press. From today’s primary point of view, things were built -up.
Donald Trump does not drink. Joe Biden does not drink.
But Jack Kennedy often would have a number of drinks with his neighbor with Georgetown Ben Bradlee – Benjamin Crowninshield Bradlee – who was two years the junior of the blue blood politician at Harvard and served as he did with a great distinction in the naval battles of the Second World War in the South Pacific. Their relationship continued, the 1950s while Bradlee held senior positions at Newsweek and the Washington Post and Kennedy went from the senator to the president. Could not, could not, did not happen today.
I just finished “Fierce Ambition”, a fascinating biography of Maggie Higgins, the first American journalist to win a Pulitzer prize for war reports. She was on the front line with our troops in Germany, Korea – where she won the Pulitzer and is almost dead in combat – and in Vietnam. A great beauty, she was also a neighbor from Kennedy in Georgetown, and a drinker with many drinks with him. In the end, she became from, as we say in the newspaper sector, so much so that she married an army general, and died at 45 years from a tropical disease collected in the Vietnamese jungle. Although she was still a great journalist, she also constantly put JFK in letters and cables to extend the American fight against Ho Chi Minh.
Donald Trump, formerly almost also chummy with liberals such as Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, at his old age made a ballistic unleashing against the media. He prohibits the Associated Press from covering it because it does not rename the Gulf of Mexico, after 400 years, the Gulf of America. Although he clearly likes Fox News and A, far beyond any Kennedyesque Chumouble, has appointed 19 people of current and old Fox to work in his administration – often because he thinks that they are watching the Telegenic Party – he continued CBS for literally $ 20 billion for what he considers to deceive the modifications of an interview with the presidential candidate of the Kamala Harris era. He continued the sounder for the monks’ register to predict that Trump would lose the race in Iowa last November, that he did not lose much. The sounder was wrong. But what kind of president in a non -Stalinist nation thinks that the fact of evil is a federal offense?
Stop a moment to consider the dangerously crazy situation that this presents in the only nation of the world which considers freedom of expression and the freedom of the fundamental press of its existence, in its constitution. Brendan Carr, Trump’s FCC president, after opening investigations to Firm takers NPR and PBS, said last week in an interview he was considering attracting the CBS diffusion permit.
It may be too chimmy – I think it’s – for a president to have a lot of drinks with people who cover it. But it is nothing compared to prosecute them for $ 20 billion and try to put them on bankruptcy. Call them “human scum”. Do you know what’s scomme? An American president trying to pass the first amendment to the constitution in the trash.
Why, the Americans of all political bands, do you let it do it?
Larry Wilson is part of the Southern California News Group editorial committee. lwilson@scng.com.
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