A Quote by Bret Stephens

When Trump attacks the news media, he's kicking a wounded animal. — © Bret Stephens
When Trump attacks the news media, he's kicking a wounded animal.
The First Amendment protects the news media and the news media knows how to use it. Donald Trump doesn't understand it, he's never going to understand it.
What a strange thing it is to recognize a sound like the shriek of a wounded animal, when you've never heard the shriek of a wounded animal.
One of the things we've learned about Donald Trump is he totally obsessed by the media. He is like the media critic-in-chief. He watches more cable news than people who work in cable news do. And he's extremely thin skinned about it.
In terms of media, we did not get the kind of media attention that somebody like a Donald Trump got, because media is not necessarily interested in the issues facing the middle class, more interested in attacks in personality. So I think there were a lot of reasons.
Trump walked into a media setting for which he was far better suited than the other contenders because he actually knows how to do reality TV and made them all look like pretenders. And I would argue that our news media has only gotten worse since Trump got in office. Trump is media crack. The ratings have never been higher. The reason CNN would run an hour of an empty podium waiting for him to show up during the campaign is because they were terrified if they turned away from Trump their rating would go down.
The news media are, for the most part, the bringers of bad news... and it's not entirely the media's fault, bad news gets higher ratings and sells more papers than good news.
Trump base is solid, and there's nothing the media can do to break it. There's not a single thing they can do. They are never gonna give that up, either. They are doing everything they can to split up Trump supporters from Trump. Only Trump can do that. The media didn't make Trump and, as I repeatedly say, they can't bust him.
Mr. Trump understands that attacking the media is the reddest of meat for his base, which has been conditioned to reject reporting from news sites outside of the conservative media ecosystem.
When Trump goes after the media and calls it fake news, he should be impeached - and everyone should say this. But the media lives in fear.
During his 2016 campaign, Mr. Trump didn't rely on the word 'hoax.' He didn't even say 'fake news.' He called the news media 'sick' and biased, but he didn't seriously start to deny its legitimacy until January 2017, when he was confronted by evidence that the Russian government aided his election. That's when he truly needed the news to be fake.
Trump and his supporters often lambast news sources such as CNN as being the 'fake-news media' whose only goal is to take him down, and they're really doing themselves no favors when they say things that seem to support that.
It's clear the media, of course, always gives you the bad news. And people who rely on the media, like Mr. Trump, think that everything is a disaster. The media always tries to make everything into a disaster, but it's mostly rubbish. It's a point of fact that we're doing extremely well.
When President Trump attacks the media and his political opponents for criticizing him, he's attacking our founding principles.
President Trump is treating the judiciary the way he treats the media. But the harm created by these attacks could be far greater.
People who travel in China tell me that the mood there is still very upbeat, because their media is different from our media. Chinese media emphasize how well things are going and suppress the bad news and publish the good news.
The media are used to being able to control the agenda of both their friends and their enemies, their buddies and their opponents, and Trump doesn't play by their rules because Trump is not afraid of them. And Trump knows that he doesn't need them. That's the big equalizer. Unlike most Republicans who think they can't get anywhere without at least some favorable treatment in the media or at least less criticism from the media, Trump doesn't need the media. He's got his Twitter account and he's got his rallies.
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