Always 'the enemy': Trump steps up media assault in first 100 days

Trump's assault on mainstream media empowers conservative bloggers, threatens press freedom, and shifts American democratic values.

With lawsuits and tirades about “the enemy of the people”, Donald Trump has launched a frontal assault on the mainstream media, while empowering conservative bloggers and podcasters to get his radical agenda across.

The President has stepped up his long-established hostility towards TV news channels like CNN and newspapers such as The New York Times, but even the Associated Press news agency has been under intense fire.

The AP has become a test case for editorial independence after it was barred from the Oval Office and Air Force One over its decision to refer to the “Gulf of Mexico” – and not the “Gulf of America” as decreed by Mr. Trump.

As well as his fiery rhetoric against the press, Mr. Trump has sued private channel CBS, regional newspaper The Des Moines Register, and pressured ABC which paid $15 million when threatened with a defamation lawsuit.

“The White House’s moves to curtail journalists’ abilities to do their jobs and document what’s happening is unprecedented,” said Katherine Jacobsen, the Committee to Protect Journalists’ U.S. program director.

“This attempt to control the narrative threatens both freedom of the press, and American democratic values.”

The Trump administration has moved fast, pressing to dismantle U.S. overseas outlets Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia, and threatening to starve NPR public radio and PBS television of federal funds.