Over 300 U.S newspapers have decided to run editorials on Thursday defending freedom of the press in response to President Donald Trump calling some media organizations ‘enemies of the American people’, Reuters reported. The Boston Globe first published an editorial, joined by the New York Times and a number of smaller newspapers headquartered in states that Trump had won during the 2016 Presidential election.
The editorial board of The Boston Globe published a piece online on Wednesday accusing the U.S President of a “sustained assault on the free press.”
“The greatness of America is dependent on the role of a free press to speak the truth to the powerful,” the Globe piece said. “To label the press ‘the enemy of the people’ is as un-American as it is dangerous to the civic compact we have shared for more than two centuries.”
The White House representatives were not available for comment.
Conservative website Townhall.com has published an opinion piece from Tom Tradup which accused newspapers of taking part in the push for ‘collusion’.
“Unlike the mastodons at The Boston Globe, I would not presume to tell anyone else what to think or what to do,” Tradup wrote. “But as for me – and I suspect many others – I won’t be putting any coins in any newspaper box August 16th.”
The Kansas City Star, harbored in Missouri were Trump had won, in its online editorial on Wednesday gave a comparison to Trump’s comments on the media to Stalin’s silencing of his critics. Talking about ‘fake news’, it said, “Everywhere in the country, any matter that an official doesn’t want to talk about or that a reader doesn’t want to hear about is ‘fake news’ now.”
In Febraury 2017, Donald Trump had tweeted: “The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American people!”
