In case you haven’t gotten your daily dose of Donald Trump inducing nausea, now Mr. Trump has threatened to boycott the upcoming CNN debate unless a $5M blackmail is paid to the charity of his choice.
You’ll recall that earlier Mr. Trump has boycotted various media outlets for coverage he deems unfavorable, and even threatened to sue one of his primary opponents over negative advertisements. Like most other things Trump, this should be of concern to the average person.
The moment it becomes acceptable to sue political opponents and blackmail the media (even if you don’t like the media), democracy is placed in hospice. Suddenly the ability of news organizations to publish a story some candidate (or worse, an elected official) doesn’t like goes out the window. Now editors will need to consider whether or not it’s worth losing access to the politician, and most news organizations, driven by profit, will have a conflict of interest. Publish only so-called ‘nice’ media or be banished. If this happens, there’s a chance you’ll never hear another opposing view out of the press for fear of reprisal.
What if Barack Obama declared that he’d only allow Fox reporters in the Whitehouse briefings if they paid whatever blackmail he dreamed up? What if the president threw out every conservative media outlet from his press events and only took questions from friendly sources? The difference between Trump and Obama is clear: you’ll rarely, if ever, hear Obama complain about the press even though Fox News has treated him very unfairly (Sean Hannity for example ran a multi-hour show titled ‘Portrait of a Radical’ the night of the 2008 election.)
Obama is clever enough to answer questions and man enough not to complain about the fairness. He’s not a whiner and he’s not afraid to call on Fox and their crony reporters. (And if you think Fox and other conservative media has been fair to Obama, you must be one of those libertarian Republicans because you’re smoking some good stuff.)
Just because you don’t like the point of view of the ‘liberal’ media, that’s no reason to kill democracy and democracy can’t live without media that’s allowed to say what it thinks, even if the schoolyard bully Donald Trump doesn’t like it.
Trump is bad for this country. Roughing up protesters, rounding up Mexicans like criminals, and listing all Muslims in some fascist database makes him more of a threat to our way of life than any other politician or outside terror group.