PreMedia

Trump is turning the media into a mouthpiece of the regime

17.03.2025

Karl Malik

As the White House handpicks members of the press pool, questions for the president amount to fluffy valentines. ou know we’re in trouble when Fox News emerges as the great defender of freedom of the press.

But such was the case when Jacqui Heinrich, a senior political correspondent at Fox, responded to the news that Trump’s White House would now handpick the reporters who get to cover the president in small settings, with the post: “This move does not give the power back to the people – it gives power to the White House.”

The fruits of the new policy were richly on display during the sickening scene that unfolded in the Oval Office last week. If the president and JD Vance’s disgraceful treatment of Volodymyr Zelenskyy wasn’t bad enough, there was the unprecedented role that the “press” played in the unseemly drama.For whether scripted or not, these are the kinds of questions we should expect when serious journalists are replaced with mouthpieces of the regime, puppets who perform the role of state propagandists in the guise of reportage. Glenn, who dates Marjorie Taylor Greene and describes himself as “100% behind President Trump”, claims not to truck in far-right conspiracy theories – while insisting that January 6 was an antifa-instigated inside job and that a vast mechanism of fraud cost Trump the 2020 election. But before Glenn turned on the Ukrainian president, he had directed an earlier question to Trump:

“Mr President, [do] you think ultimately your legacy will be the peacemaker and not the president that led this country into another war … ?” This puffball in the guise of a query gave Trump the opportunity to wax poetic: “I hope I’m going to be remembered as a peacemaker … I’m doing this to save lives more than anything else … Thank you, Brian, for that question. It was a nice question.”

Once again, Trump grew almost wistful – “I like the question … it’s a very good question” – before blaming Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Hamas’s attack on Israel on Joe Biden. From there, as we witnessed, things grew more acrimonious, but lost in the belligerent and belittling treatment of Zelenskyy, particularly at the hands of Vance (“Have you said thank you once, this entire meeting?”) was the Pyongyang-esque quality of Trump’s hand-picked pool reporters using their questions not to challenge or examine, but to burnish and bolster the Great Leader with ever fluffier valentines of adoration.

Meanwhile, the Associated Press remained barred from the historic meeting, because it continues to call a body of water that lies almost entirely outside of US jurisdiction by the name it has carried since the 16th century.

Under Donald Trump, the free media in the USA are being buried. Free speech has become very dangerous for journalists. This is a tragedy for what was arguably the former leading nation of the free world. The partnership with Russian President Putin, who is continuing a devastating war of aggression against Ukraine on a daily basis, speaks a clear language for this.

The USA - still a reliable partner for the free world?

Sincerely yours, Prof. Ing. Karl Malik

karl.malik@premedianewsletter.de

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