President Trump in Macomb County this year.
Does the news media get it wrong sometimes? Yes.
But the "fake news" mantra that President Trump has chanted endlessly is simply a way of saying anything he doesn't like in the news is fake. He repeatedly decscribes journalists as the enemy of the people.
Detroit Free Press columnist Mitch Albom weighs in:
So when the idea that the press is the “enemy” of America starts to float, we ought to be concerned. After all, you can name two other famous leaders in the last century who defined their critics as “enemies of the people”: Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and Chinese dictator Mao Zedong.
We don’t want to go down those roads, do we?
Now, anytime someone IN the media starts talking ABOUT the media, critics scream bias. “What do you expect?” they say. “He works in the business.” They never say that the reason he — or she — may work in the business is precisely for the reasons he or she is defending.
But rather than go down that rabbit hole, let us simply look at a world without a free press. This is a fantasy for our current president — and, more and more, some of his ardent supporters.
Albom ticks off things journalists have exposed over the years, such as Sen. Joseph McCarthy's 1950s witch hunt for supposed communists in the federal government, President Richard Nixon's Watergate scandal and on and on.
