Stephanie Blair | Editor-in-Chief
Being a journalist with disdain for Donald Trump is not a new phenomenon. However, I’d like to take these few column inches to give a fuller explanation as to why I — as a journalist and not as anything else — have a particular problem with him.
Donald J. Trump has no respect for the press and its role in society but, even worse, he has no respect for the First Amendment.
His list of assaults on the First Amendment is almost as long as the list of his assaults on women, so I can’t enumerate all of them. However, for some context, in February of 2016, before his election, Trump stated, “one of the things I’m going to do if I win — and I hope I do, and we’re certainly leading — is I’m going to open up our libel laws, so when they (the media) write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money.”
Okay, so he wants to partially repeal the First Amendment. But hey, that was pre-election. He said lots of things before the election. But what has he said now that he has been elected?
Most recently, he tweeted that NBC should have their broadcasting license revoked because the stories they report are damaging to his reputation and, he claims, false.
On Oct. 11, Trump started the day by tweeting, “with all of the Fake News coming out of NBC and the Networks, at what point is it appropriate to challenge their License? Bad for country!” Later in the day, he continued, saying, “network news has become so partisan, distorted and fake that licenses must be challenged and, if appropriate, revoked. Not fair to public!”
Not only is shutting down news sources simply because they don’t help the agenda of the government absurd and a blatant violation of the First Amendment, but him threatening to do so is, too.
In 2015, the Seventh Circuit stated that “a public official who tries to shut down an avenue of expression of ideas and opinions through ‘actual or threatened imposition of government power or sanction’ is violating the First Amendment,” in the case of Backpage.com v. Dart.
Either our president is completely unfamiliar with our Bill of Rights, or he simply doesn’t care. Given how vocal he’s been about the Second Amendment, I would guess the latter. And that should scare the daylights out of every citizen in our country.
Even Thomas Jefferson, the slave owning, rapist, P.O.S. that he was, recognized that “our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.”
Contact the author at sblair13@wou.edu
