Newspapers in the US have run editorials defending the freedom of the press in response to President Donald Trump's allegation that media organisations are the enemies of the American people.
Initiated by The Boston Globe, the movement was joined by the New York Times and a number of smaller newspapers, including some in states that Trump won during the 2016 presidential election. More than 300 newspapers have joined the movement.
The Boston Globe editorial board, in a piece posted online on Wednesday, accused Trump of carrying out a “sustained assault on the free press.”
“The greatness of America is dependent on the role of a free press to speak the truth to the powerful,” the Globe piece said. “To label the press ‘the enemy of the people’ is as un-American as it is dangerous to the civic compact we have shared for more than two centuries.”
Trump, in treating the media at times like an opposition party, has responded to unflattering reports as “fake news.”
For instance, in February 2017 the president tweeted that “The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American people!”
The Kansas City Star, in Missouri which Trump won in the 2016 presidential election, in its editorial also compared Trump’s comments on the media to Stalin’s silencing of his critics. And it took issue with the term “fake news.”
“Everywhere in the country, any matter that an official doesn’t want to talk about or that a reader doesn’t want to hear about is ‘fake news’ now,” the Star said in its editorial, which ran online on Wednesday.