Research/Study
Trump’s new campaign manager has called journalists “the enemy of this country”
Published
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Journalists should expect no respite from President Donald Trump’s war on the press from his new campaign manager, Brad Parscale, whose role as head of Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign was announced Tuesday. Parscale, who served as the digital media director of Trump’s 2016 presidential run, regularly uses his Twitter feed to go after the “fake news” media, and has written that “the media is the enemy of this country.”
Trump and his administration are engaged in unprecedented attacks on the press, regularly accusing journalists of deliberately fabricating stories out of political animus and declaring reporters the “enemy of the American people.”
At the same time, Trump has eschewed transparency. He held only one formal press conference in all of 2017 and has not sat for a TV news interview with a legitimate journalist since May, preferring instead the softball questions of sycophantic supporters, especially those who work for Fox News.
Parscale’s commentary promises more of the same:
Like many others on the right, Parscale has focused his criticism, in particular, on three news outlets:
The New York Times:
The Washington Post:
CNN:
Parscale was particularly angry with CNN in May after the network refused to air an ad from Trump’s re-election campaign that “featured the words ‘fake news’ superimposed over several TV journalists.” CNN had requested that the campaign remove that section from the ad because it was not true. Parscale claimed that CNN had violated Federal Communications Commission regulations (it hadn’t):
In contrast, like Trump himself, Parscale is more comfortable with employees at Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News and The Wall Street Journal:
