President Donald Trump has had an adversarial relationship with the media for a long time. And who can blame him? If the entire mainstream press ganged up on you, wouldn’t you be a little bit miffed?
Yet Trump often gamely engages the press. He’ll spend plenty of his valuable time answering questions and putting journalists in their place. His administration is also giving alternative media (especially conservative outlets) a seat at the table, and that rankles legacy media in so many ways.
According to USA Today, the Pulitzer Board laments that the current administration doesn’t allow the left-wing legacy media to dominate the discourse today. After awarding this year’s Pulitzer Prizes — including one to a left-wing outlet that lied about one woman’s death to try to discredit Georgia’s pro-life law, which I wrote about last year — one board member dared to complain that today’s media landscape isn’t monolithically anti-conservative.
The paper quotes Marjorie Miller, an administrator with the Pulitzers, who uses the most melodramatic language she can:
But the awards were announced amid “particularly difficult times for media and publishers in the U.S.,” according to Miller.
Dangers include growing threats of legal harassment of journalists reporting critically on powerful people, banning of books and attacks on the integrity of news reporters.
“These efforts are meant to silence criticism, to edit or rewrite history,” Miller said. “They’re an attempt to erode the First Amendment of our Constitution which guarantees free speech.”
It’s particularly rich of Miller to whine about the freedom of the press when the Pulitzers have rewarded countless articles, reports, and political cartoons that lie about Republicans, conservatives, and the Trump administration. Even when these outlets report the truth, they do so in a way that puts the left’s narrative in the best possible light and makes the right look as bad as they can.
“What you’ll see in our journalism finalists and winners is courageous reporting and impactful storytelling from unbowed newsrooms,” Miller said. I guess “unbowed” means that these newsrooms won’t bow to truth over the progressive narrative.
Flashback: Biden, the UN, and Big Tech Are All About Press Freedom — Unless You Go Against the Narrative
USA Today also cites an organization called Reporters Without Borders, which ranks countries by press freedom. The U.S. ranks 57th, and to hear Reporters Without Borders tell it, the most dangerous job in the world is to work for the American press.
“After a century of gradual expansion of press rights in the United States, the country is experiencing its first significant and prolonged decline in press freedom in modern history, and Donald Trump’s return to the presidency is greatly exacerbating the situation,” the organization states grimly — because, you know, Orange Man Bad.
The report continues:
President Donald Trump was elected to a second term after a campaign in which he denigrated the press on a daily basis and made explicit threats to weaponize the federal government against the media. His early moves in his second mandate to politicise the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), ban the Associated Press from the White House, or dismantle the US Agency for Global Media, for example, have jeopardized the country’s news outlets and indicate that he intends to follow through on his threats, setting up a potential crisis for American journalism.
Where was the outcry when Barack Obama’s administration was spying on journalists? Was it a “potential crisis for American journalism” when the mainstream media was helping cover up Joe Biden’s mental decline? Was it an outrage when tech companies suppressed stories that bucked the left-wing narrative?
Reporters Without Borders continued with the handwringing, claiming, “According to recent studies, more Americans have no trust in the media than trust it a fair amount.”
News flash: the lack of trust in the media has nothing to do with Trump and his attitude toward the press. It’s because the American people have seen time and again that the mainstream press tilts its coverage one way. It’s the fault of the media and no one else.
Flashback: Stop the Presses: A Major Newspaper Admits Its Bias
“Online harassment, particularly towards women and minorities, is also a serious issue for journalists and can impact their quality of life and safety,” the report continues. What about harassment of conservatives? Is that a “serious issue”?
The report notes that the last American journalist to die on duty was reporter Dylan Lyons in 2023. As tragic as his death was, it wasn’t due to some draconian crackdown; the suspect in a shooting that Lyons was covering allegedly shot him and his cameraman.
Reporters Without Borders cites something called the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker. To show you how totally unbiased this outfit is, it includes a specific filter where you can see when Trump went after “journalists.”
According to the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, dozens of journalists have been arrested over the past several years, but the outfit doesn’t explain that more than a few of these “journalists” are activists who sympathetically embed themselves with the protesters that they’re covering. For example, the main arrests in Georgia over the last few years concerned “freelancers” who sided with — and lived with — the domestic terrorists trying to stop a law enforcement training center for the city of Atlanta.
It’s also worth noting that the last arrest of a freelance journalist took place on Jan. 18, 2025 — when Biden was still president. It kind of takes the wind out of the argument that the Trump administration is heavily cracking down on press freedom, doesn’t it?
“The dark humor in those statements [about the suppression of press freedom] is that everybody knows that the notion of press freedom only goes so far for these people,” I wrote last year for World Press Freedom Day. It’s only a crisis when conservative perspectives can break through the left-wing narrative. It’s only troubling when the activist “journalists” can’t continue unabated. It’s only problematic when both sides of an argument see the time of day.
The mainstream media is crying crocodile tears because it’s not the only game in town anymore. You have a choice in the perspectives you read, and that’s a good thing for everybody — except the left-wing gatekeepers who know that the jig is up.
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