Over the course of his turbulent presidency, President Trump has accused various media companies, with special attention reserved for CNN, as being purveyors of “fake news,” slamming the “fake news media” as the “enemy of the people.”
As we noted previously, although it can be safely stated that the MSM is an entrenched and relentless enemy of Donald Trump, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s an “enemy of the American people,” as Trump argues it is – it is a bit more diplomatic to say it isn’t our friend.
However, as Statista’s Niall McCarthy notes, a Quinnipiac Univerity poll released last week found that a majority of Republicans consider the news media “an enemy of the people” rather than “an important part of democracy”.
You will find more infographics at Statista
President Trump has labeled the news media the “enemy of the people” and 51 percent of GOP respondents agree with his view.
Only 5 percent of Democrats have the same opinion and 91 percent of them say the news media is an important part of democracy.
In total, 65 percent of Americans say the news media is important for democracy with just over a quarter, 26 percent, saying it is the enemy of the people.
We suspect that overall percentage will rise as censorship pendulums across the political spectrum.
With 90% of US media owned by just six companies, this sort of massive power and influence lying around like dynamite, it stands to reason, or unreason, that the corporate and political worlds will succumb to the law of attraction and gravitation, forging powerful and impregnable relationships.
It’s no secret that the politicians, our so-called ‘public servants,’ are mostly in the game to make a fast buck, while the corporations, desperate for ‘democratic representation’ to control regulation and market share, have an inexhaustible source of funds to secure it. Naturally, this oligarchical system precludes any sort of democratic participation from the average person on the street, who thinks just because he remembers to yank a lever once every several years he is somehow invested in the multibillion-dollar franchise.
As far as media corporations being ‘private enterprises’ and therefore free to demolish the freedom of speech (even censoring major media players, like Infowars, simply because they whistle to a different political tune), that is quickly becoming revealed as nothing more than corporate cover for state-sponsored machinations.
“In a corporatist system of government, wherein there is no meaningful separation between corporate power and state power, corporate censorship is state censorship,” writes Caitlin Johnstone.
“Because legalized bribery in the form of corporate lobbying and campaign donations has given wealthy Americans the ability to control the US government’s policy and behavior while ordinary Americans have no effective influence whatsoever, the US unquestionably has a corporatist system of government.”
Meanwhile, it cannot be denied, from the perspective of an impartial observer, that the mainstream media is nearly always positioned to promote the government narrative on any number of significant issues.