Is the Media the “Enemy of the People”?
Is the Media the “Enemy of the People”?
If an enemy controlled the media, would the news look any different?
By Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical left and Islamic terrorism.
Traveling on Air Force One to Helsinki, President Trump tweeted that the media was the “enemy of the people”.
It wasn’t the first time that he had said or tweeted it. And it never fails to get a rise out of the media.
President Trump had referred to the New York Times, CNN and NBC News as “the enemy of the American people” shortly after taking office. At CPAC, soon afterward, he declared, “I called the fake news the enemy of the people, and they are — they are the enemy of the people.”
Trump’s comments inspired Washington Post and New York Times pieces comparing him to Stalin. Every marginal political figure looking for 15 seconds of slobbering media coverage, from Senator Jeff Flake to Khrushchev’s great-granddaughter, joined in with the silly Stalin analogies.
CBS and NBC vet Marvin Kalb wrote a book ponderously titled, “Enemy of the People: Trump’s War on the Press, the New McCarthyism, and the Threat to American Democracy.” Despite the media’s outrage at being called names, it’s not at all shy about calling the President all sorts of apocalyptic names.
“Mr. President, will you stop calling us the enemy of the people, sir? CNN’s Jim Acosta demanded during a recent tax anniversary reform event.
That’s not too likely.
In a USA Today poll, 34% of voters agreed that the media was the enemy of the people. Other polls also showed a sizable amount of agreement that the media was innately hostile to the American people.
Is the media really the enemy of the American people? Let’s tackle the question objectively.
Enemies hate you and want to destroy you. Do the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, CBS, and the whole alphabet soup of organizations with corporate headquarters in major cities really want to destroy the people who watch their programs, buy their papers and serve them soup after hours?
It seems implausible. But so did the Communists of the Khmer Rouge shooting everyone who wore glasses. Or North Korea’s multi-generational concentration camps, Nazi Germany diverting crucial resources from the war effort to kill Jews, or Venezuela shipping oil to Cuba while its people starve.
Plausibility is a poor measure of what fanatical ideologues might do. Let’s start with what they do, do.
While Jim Acosta was demanding a retraction for being called an “enemy of the people”, the media had thrown every effort into opening the border. The American people are defined by their physical possession of the territory. And that territory and its possession is defined and measured by a border.
You can’t advocate the destruction of the American people and then object to being called their enemy.
Without a border, there is no America and no American people. The territories formerly known as the United States fill up with various peoples who claim the entitlements of citizenship but not its responsibilities, whose identity is not of their current country of residency, but of their country of birth.
You don’t need to be an American to watch CNN, MSNBC or serve soup to one of their reporters. They would rather you weren’t. That’s what replacing Americans with cheap labor and cheap votes is about.
The media’s first allegiance is to the left. Not to America. Its people are not Americans. They’re leftists. The politics of the left are geared at replacing Americans with leftists through a combination of indoctrination, demographic replacement, economic warfare and voter suppression.
Destroying the American people would be an act worthy of an “enemy of the people”.
The media is offended by being referred to as the “enemy of the people”. But does it believe that the American people have the right to exist and maintain their existence? And if so, on what terms?
The media has opposed every war that against Communism or Islamism that the United States has fought. It has sought to undermine our country and our soldiers in these conflicts on various pretexts.
The media has covered up numerous acts of violence by Islamic terrorists. It has sided with Islamic terror networks such as the Muslim Brotherhood. It has urged our government to arm Islamic terrorists. It has supported Iran’s push for a nuclear bomb. It has spread disinformation about the links between Islamic terrorists and their domestic support networks. It has worked to silence law enforcement and intelligence officials who attempted to warn about the threat of Islamic terrorism.
If the Muslim Brotherhood controlled the media, would the news look any different than it does now?
This isn’t a shocking new development. The media repeatedly sided with Communist nations, guerrillas, spies, terrorists and superpowers against our own government. It covered up atrocities by the Soviet Union, glamorized Communist spies, urged that we arm and aid Communist nations, and undermined allied governments, and even our own government and its soldiers when they fought Communism.
There has never been a time in the last century when enemy propaganda wasn’t on the front pages of the major newspapers of America. After the fall of the USSR, the media traded the red for the green. Its collusion with the Islamic conspiracy is a sequel to its collusion with the Communist conspiracy.
Is this the behavior of an American institution or an enemy institution out to destroy America?
On the domestic stage, the media has repeatedly advocated for policies that have cost countless American lives and jobs. Its pro-crime advocacy has empowered gangs and thugs. Its economic programs have devastated cities, agricultural and industrial areas.
The media’s broadcasts claim that America is evil. It empowers the hateful voices of black nationalists and Islamist activists that want to destroy America. It calls for the eradication of the major historical figures. It cheers when Christopher Columbus and George Washington are removed from public places.
Any foreigner watching and reading the media comes away with the impression that America is a racist country whose institutions and populace are utterly despicable, and who have no right to exist.
If an actual foreign enemy were in charge of our news coverage, how different would it be?
There’s really not that much difference between how the media covers America, and how Al Jazeera, RT, Xinhau and other enemy state media cover America.
An enemy media would undermine the government, publish its national security secrets, portray the people in the worst possible light and advocate policies meant to leave America poorer and weaker.
How is that any different from what the New York Times and the Washington Post already do?
The media has spent the year undermining the President of the United States on the international stage. It has leaked classified information, traded in hacked emails from Islamic terror states, made public private conversations with foreign leaders, and colluded with Democrat officials who have been assuring foreign governments, some enemies of this country, that Trump will shortly be removed from office.
Despite its attempts to drape its misconduct in the flag, the closest that anyone from the media has ever gotten to being a patriot was Gillette Stadium. Its scorched earth war on Trump is damaging our international standing. The media doesn’t care because it has no allegiance to this country.
Is it wrong under these circumstances to call the media an enemy of the people?
The media doesn’t support national borders. It opposes any attempt to preserve the American people in some meaningful form. It aids and abets enemies of the United States. It sides with fanatical ideologies waging war on America. It opposes the outcome of any election that its political allies don’t win.
The media claims to be very offended when it’s referred to as the “enemy of the people”. But it’s only the people part that offends it. The “people” are the vague and amorphous grouping that the left claims to be fighting for. Every leftist regime in history murdered the people in the name of the people.
Like every leftist movement, the media wants to destroy the American people… for the people.
The media believes that it is fighting for the people. By the “people”, it means illegal migrants, Islamic terrorists, MS-13 gang members, Baltimore drug dealers, black nationalist separatists and everyone who hates and wants to destroy the United States and the unique national identity of the American people.
A more accurate description of the media would be the “Enemies of the American People”.