TRAVIS LEFEVRE
Lampoon Editor
The press has come under heavy fire in the past couple of months, mostly thanks to the Trump administration. One thing that people seem to forget amongst this witch hunt for “fake news” is that the press has rights, and, believe it or not, their rights are expressed in the Constitution. That’s not an alternative fact.
Mass media outlets like CNN and Fox News absolutely have a bias in their reporting. Finding completely unbiased news is like trying to get that last drop of Gatorade out of the bottle—it’s most likely not going to happen. Whether or not you believe that CNN or other news outlets are “fake news,” quite frankly, is irrelevant.
Just because a man stands on a pedestal and calls them fake news doesn’t make it true, firstly, and it doesn’t change the fact that they are part of the press and as such have just as many rights as your favorite news outlet.
The President of the United States of America is using his power to discredit those whose views oppose him. The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Politico, BBC and The Guardian were blocked from a press conference, while Breitbart was let in. He is manipulating the perception of the media and the media itself while attempting to block out the rights outlined to journalists in the First Amendment.
The guy who’s “calling out” fake news is also the one who’s getting his information from extremely politically skewed media like Breitbart, who posts articles like “Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy,” and InfoWars, whose host, glorified conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, believes that fluoride in water “turns the friggin’ frogs gay” and that Sandy Hook was a farce.
I think the mainstream media can be extremely biased, but I’m not going around pointing fingers and calling them fake news. Instead, I’m working toward my degree in hopes to someday change the political skew in news media instead of making a toilet-side tweet every time I feel like something is “unfair.”
The truth is that Trump’s skin is so thin that he can’t stand to hear anything negative about him, lest his ego gets put to the test.
Trump’s supporters like to throw around the term “snowflake” to those whose opinions they don’t like, especially on the left. These same people fail to see that the same person that they praise is arguably an even bigger, oranger snowflake.