Jim Acosta posted a video to Twitter from the Tampa, Florida, event held Tuesday evening which showed the aggressive crowd shouting and flipping the bird at reporters and camera crews in the press pool. One bearded man was wearing a “F— the Media” tee-shirt.
“Just a sample of the sad scene we faced at the Trump rally in Tampa,” the CNN veteran tweeted. “I’m very worried that the hostility whipped up by Trump and some in conservative media will result in somebody getting hurt. We should not treat our fellow Americans this way.”
Just a sample of the sad scene we faced at the Trump rally in Tampa. I’m very worried that the hostility whipped up by Trump and some in conservative media will result in somebody getting hurt. We should not treat our fellow Americans this way. The press is not the enemy. IhSRw5Ui3R
— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) August 1, 2018
One man stared at the camera, saying angrily, “Stop the lying.” The unjustified anger is heating up, even as Trump has said he looks forward to having more rallies, like six or seven a week, in the countdown to the 2018 fall mid-term elections. And it is easy to figure out where all the hatred for the press is coming from – Directly from Trump’s mouth.
Seriously, level-headed people, and I am betting there are some of us still left in this country, will remember back during the campaign for president, when Trump started injecting his brand of hatred against minorities, women, and anyone who wasn’t totally white into his speeches.
Yet, when the news media called him out on the many lies, or “fake news” he was spouting, he turned his attention to working up his core supporters in a way that has not been seen in our country in many, many decades.
But keep in mind, during the civil rights marches, the Vietnam war protests, and even further back in history to the lynchings of black Americans in the South, the press reported the events, good and bad. All this was not made up news, it was real as it gets.
Trump supporters heckled CNN’s Jim NBCNews reporter AliVitali talked to one of them about why. Learn more: 11MSNBC 11thHour W4HpR9RvFZ
— 11th Hour (@11thHour) August 1, 2018
An enemy of the people?Some people might say the ramped up attacks against the press are because of the “Russia investigation” and Trump’s worries over getting charged with some sort of crime. But remember, he had started his campaign against the press before he was ever elected to office.
One thing is for sure though – when you are the president, and you repeatedly tweet or in a speech continually call the press “an enemy of the people,” you are sowing the seeds of hatred that is sure to ignite into a full-blown wildfire that will sweep across this nation.
Rob Miraldi, writing in the Poughkeepsie Journal on July 5, writes: I am haunted by a photograph that has been making the rounds on social media. A dark-haired man at a Trump rally wears a T-shirt with the back emblazoned in red: “Rope. Tree. Journalist. Some Assembly Required.”
What will it take for the American public to wake up to what is happening to this country? The only group putting out fake news is Donald Trump and his administration, and those who work for him are too damned afraid of him to say anything different. We have seen what happens to countries when the freedom of the press is stifled – Freedom, freedom of speech, the right to expression and the right to listen to other opinions is killed.
