Trump: America No Longer Has a ‘Free Press’
Trump: America No Longer Has a ‘Free Press’

By Jack Phillips

Former President Donald Trump, in an interview on Monday morning, decried the media landscape in the United States saying it no longer has a “free press.”

Using the current border crisis as an example of a lack of proper coverage, Trump said that “this is not a free press,” according to his interview on Lisa Boothe’s podcast on Monday morning.  “This is a press that we have to be very, very smart to get around, but they don’t cover bad things if it happens to be bad for Democrats. It’s pretty amazing. You take a look at some of the coverage and some of the travesty that’s taking place at the border, and the coverage is not commensurate.”

The former commander-in-chief remarked: “If you look at NBC, ABC, CBS, and of course CNN and MSNBC, and see—if you look at some of those networks—it’s just not covered. It’s covered so little. It’s amazing. And it’s a massive story because it’s going to destroy—it’s going to destroy our country.”

Throughout his presidency, Trump decried the “fake news” media, using the pejorative to describe outlets that he believed promoted certain narratives that went against him or his policies while generally promoting his opponents or critics. The former president also repeatedly panned MSNBC, the New York Times, and CNN—saying these outlets are essentially wings of the Democratic Party.

Over the weekend, one longtime Getty photojournalist, John Moore, called on the Biden administration to allow media workers to observe U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents operate as a massive surge of illegal immigrants arrives at the Southern Border.

“I respectfully ask US Customs and Border Protection to stop blocking media access to their border operations,” Moore wrote on Twitter Friday. “I have photographed CBP under Bush, Obama and Trump but now—zero access is granted to media. These long lens images [were] taken from the Mexican side.”

“There’s no modern precedent for a full physical ban on media access to CBP border operations,” Moore added in another Twitter comment. “To those who might say, cut them some slack—they are dealing with a situation, I’d say that showing the U.S. response to the current immigrant surge is exactly the media’s role.

Recent polls have suggested that Americans are largely distrustful of corporate, mass media. A Gallup poll released last year showed that only 9 percent of Americans trust the media “a great deal” and 31 percent trust it a “fair amount.” Meanwhile, 33 percent have “no trust” at all in the media and 27 percent don’t trust the media “very much,” according to the survey. In other polls, a significant number of Americans have blamed mass media for exacerbating the political divide in the U.S.

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