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Support for free press leaves some distressed

To the editor,

On your proclamation of freedom of the press…

The three of you churn out on behalf of your publications one point of view — boring predictable liberalism regardless of the topic or any story you cover or invent.

You made your bold self righteous self congratulatory courageous stand on behalf of freedom of the press which is hilariously hypocritical for a press that wouldn’t know the meaning of journalism and unbiased reporting if it bit you.

The real focus is your hatred of President Trump. Here is some news: you, the press, are free to say and write whatever you wish to say and write whatever you wish and you do. No one stops you, no one has attempted to stop you.

President Trump has made a major contribution toward free speech and a free society, by the way, by pointing out everyday that reporters of all kinds are more than 90 percent liberal by any metric you choose to look at; there is not journalism out there but there is 24-7 hate Trump propaganda.

The media has always been left-leaning but never more so than now.

You — and I mean “you” in the broader picture of your left-leaning cronies — don’t like being called out for your propaganda, your completely one-sided reporting, your prejudice against any non-victim minority group and your obvious anti-American rhetoric. You, the media, has never given Republicans and conservatives a fair hearing and you never will, and you don’t like Donald Trump calling you out for what you are. According to you, he should just take his beatings in the press every single day like a good Republican and cower under his desk.

There is a reason why Donald Trump got elected and your reporting would improve dramatically if you tried to understand it and learn from it. But instead, you are one more voice for whiny crybabies, victimhood and part of the growing chorus that would ironically shut down free speech if it disagrees with your hallowed opinions.

You are mad Trump won and you refuse to deal with his election by a majority of the American people. We got sick of being lied to by politicians over the past eight years who made America worse across the board.

You’ve dedicated yourself to getting rid of Trump for over two years — since before his nomination even — and you have come up with nothing; nothing but the fact that in spite of your efforts Trump has done nothing that even approaches Hillary Clinton, the most corrupt presidential candidate in American history and a president, in Obama, who lied to America and double-crossed the will of The American people constantly. Where was free, open and honest journalism in covering Benghazi, the IRS scandal, the billions hand-delivered by Obama to Iran to rebuild its nuclear arsenal, the Holder-Obama ‘Fast and Furious’ scandal, running American guns to Mexican drug cartels and the blatant interference in the last Israeli election and in pushing a Muslim Brotherhood member, Mohamed Morsi, as the new president of Egypt. Where was your intense outrage and intense scrutiny for all those years?

Some free press: free to mislead the people.

Obama weaponized the IRS and the FBI and the Department of Justice to prevent Trump from becoming President and continuing its incredible campaign to remove him once elected. This is the biggest scandal in American history and you, the press, are not interested.

Everything is a complete double standard. Trump needs to keep calling you out when you lie and twist every single story around to make him look bad. “How many Diet Cokes does Trump drink, how many scoops of ice cream, what about Melania’s shoes or what it says on her t-shirt…”

Is it a free press when John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign manager, had regular meetings with CNN and the networks and the New York Times and the Washington Press on what to report and how to report it ? How is free speech doing on college campuses and in Hollywood and on Facebook, which now employs the Southern Law Policy Center to determine what content is not permitted on their site ? Hint: It tends to be exclusively against Christians, conservatives and any group supporting Trump and Republicans.

Recently we’ve seen some in the press even defending MS-13 because they have to stoke the narrative that Trump wants to stop all immigration! (No. He wants to vet the people that come here so we don’t have cruel violent criminals coming in —in the case of MS-13 — murdering and mutilating innocent American citizens. Somehow leniency toward MS-13 is “anti-Trump,” and if it’s anti Trump, it’s all good, apparently.

And don’t even try to say that this is how conservatives view all immigrants! Another lie constantly propagated! Conservatives want legal immigrants who want to become American citizens able to be a credit to us, not a liability.

Where is your credibility when every single article reports on only one side of every issue? Where is the conservative writer among you? How about a semblance of balance. Not everyone thinks the way you do. Why are you afraid of presenting more balanced reporting? Readers might appreciate you a lot more and conservatives would appreciate the effort.

Ignorant people cannot remain free and the press overall is misleading a majority of people, so I think you should take that notion of a free press a lot more seriously.

Fred Fredericks

Brooklyn

. . .

To the editor,

“Attacks on the free press are attacks on American values,” Aug. 17-23, 2018.

I believe that this editorial was mis-titled. It should have said, “Unreasonable attacks on the free press are attacks on American values.” President Trump, when he first used the phrase, “fake news” was not referring to the left-leaning, slanted and biased mainstream media as fake news.

He was referring to the fact that certain media outlets were, and still are, treating him unfairly, and in that respect are fake news. I have yet to see on mainstream TV news outlets, coverage of any of the positive things that the President has done during his first 19 months in office. The numbers in every measurement of his success are moving in the right direction: the GDP is up, the GNP is up, more jobs are being added, unemployment is at the lowest point in recent history, and jobs lost to overseas are returning. Those are facts, but the mainstream media doesn’t report them and if and when they do it is only in passing and then they go back to the negative. He’s not the most polished silver spoon in the drawer, and when he is attacked, he fights back. He tweets because he knows he won’t get fair treatment from the mainstream media, and he hasn’t. It’s not just President Trump that has no use for the mainstream media. The people who elected him — the majority of Americans, feel the same way. I defy anyone to name one person in the White House press corps — guests in the White House — who was as rude to any other president in the 20th century as Jim Acosta has been to President Trump, and when asked to leave the briefing, he refused! The mainstream media has laser-like focus on this president which was noticeably absent during the Obama administration. How can they be taken seriously when they pick and choose which president they will skewer, like George W. Bush and Donald Trump, and which president will get a free pass, like they did with President Clinton and President Obama? The mainstream media is running with the fake news of colluding with the Russians, when they totally ignore the more-than-ample evidence of Hillary Clinton’s real collusion with the Russians in the Uranium-1 deal, the criminally negligent handling of classified materials, the physical destruction of electronic devices under subpoena, her incompetent handling of the debacle in Benghazi and many other things, which were never properly investigated because of malfeasance in the Department of Justice and the FBI. Mueller has no case, yet the mainstream media is doing everything in its power to help to unseat a duly elected president. Reporting and broadcasting only the negative side of this president amounts to propaganda.

As far as dictatorial practices by Mayor DeBlasio in having his security detail eject a New York Post reporter from a news conference because the question embarrassed him, this mayor apparently thinks he can do as he pleases. In his defense, you must look at his history. He loves dictatorships. He honeymooned in Cuba, worked for a time in Nicaragua, all places where the media was heavily controlled, and editors who opposed them either went to jail or just disappeared — which are the true Stalinist tactics, as you know.

A free media which is also unbiased and fair, is necessary in a free society, and members of the fourth estate must realize that they have a responsibility to report truth in order to be the watchdog of our constitutional republic.

David F. Podesta

Marine Park