The president of CNN is warning that journalism is in danger under President Donald Trump. Speaking at the Overseas Press Club of America, Jeff Zucker claimed, “Journalism is threatened by senior officials in our own government.”
This is not the first time Zucker has sounded the alarm about the supposed threat posed by Trump, having warned in the past that the President is waging a campaign to “delegitimize journalism.“
While Trump has repeatedly slammed the establishment media over rolling out “fake news,” deliberately misleading the American people, and unfairly targeting him, Zucker’s claim that journalism is legitimately “threatened” by the Trump administration is hyperbole. It also reveals a double standard on the CNN president’s part. Here are four reasons why.
1. Trump has criticized specific news outlets. So did Barack Obama. Trump, of course, has declared that news outlets like the “failing” New York Times and CNN are “the enemy of the American people.” Obama had a penchant for frequently attacking Fox News and Rush Limbaugh:
“If a Republican member of Congress is not punished on Fox News or by Rush Limbaugh for working with a Democrat on a bill of common interest, then you’ll see more of them doing it,” Obama said in an interview with The New Republic.
Back in September, Obama lamented in a fundraiser that the race was close because “if all you’re doing is watching Fox News and listening to Rush Limbaugh … a lot of misinformation on a regular basis, then it’s very hard for you to think that you’re going to vote for somebody who you’ve been told is taking the country in the wrong direction.”
Obama also recently blamed Donald Trump’s election win on the notion that Fox News is playing “in every bar and restaurant in big chunks of the country” in an interview with Rolling Stone.
That’s not to excuse Trump’s over-the-top statement about the media being the “enemy” of the people, but it reveals a lack of intellectual honesty for Zucker to act like Trump is harming journalism for criticizing certain news outlets, while absolving Obama for doing the same thing.
2. Trump has not implemented any policies that suppress freedom of the press. While Trump has called for loosening libel laws – a move that could certainly suppress freedom of the press – such laws can only be changed at the state level. So unless Trump acts beyond his authority, such calls are meaningless. Otherwise, there’s nothing to suggest that Trump is taking any action to limit journalistic freedoms.
3. The Obama administration actually did partake in actions against a news outlet and a journalist that were chilling. As The Daily Wire has previously reported, Obama’s Department of Justice went after the Associated Press and Fox News reporter James Rosen:
In the AP’s case, the DOJ was investigating a story involving “a CIA operation in Yemen that foiled an al-Qaeda plot in the spring of 2012 to set off a bomb on an airplane headed to the United States,” according to the Washington Post. The DOJ seized two months of phone records from the AP without informing the news outlet.
“There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters,” Gary Pruitt, president of the AP wrote to Holder at the time. “These records potentially reveal communications with confidential sources across all of the newsgathering activities undertaken by the AP during a two-month period, provide a road map to AP’s newsgathering operations, and disclose information about AP’s activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know.”
In the Rosen case, the DOJ was investigating a story Rosen did involving North Korea and tracked “his movements and conversations,” according to Fox News, including phone numbers belonging to Rosen’s parents. The DOJ had listed Rosen as a “co-conspirator” under the Espionage Act in regards to the story—allegedly pressing a source for classified information. Rosen was never charged with a crime.
Fox News executive Michael Clemente called the DOJ’s actions against Rosen “downright chilling.” “We will unequivocally defend [Rosen’s] right to operate as a member of what up until now has always been a free press,” Clemente said in a statement, per the Washington Post.
4. The biggest threat to journalism is actually the media themselves. The left-wing media is increasingly discrediting themselves with their openly partisan reporting. CNN is a perfect example of this, as their chyrons are constantly fact-checking Trump in ways they never did for Obama or Hillary Clinton. Most of the worst fake news stories from 2016 were stemming from left-wing news outlets. Ben Rhodes, Obama’s national security advisor, openly gloated about lying to the media about the Iran deal, yet the media did not voice any displeasure about being manipulated.
Unless Trump starts actively shutting down news outlets, Zucker really has no leg to stand on in his claims that Trump is “threatening” journalism. If he wants to see what really poses the biggest threat to journalism, Zucker should take a long look in the mirror instead.