The mainstream media has been up in arms over the weekend after President Donald Trump tweeted that what he calls the “fake news media” is the “enemy of the American people.”
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Trump’s tweet was widely denounced by members across the political spectrum, including every mainstream outlet, but also Sen. John McCain (R-AZ).
“If you want to preserve democracy as we know it, you have to have a free and many times adversarial press,” McCain told Meet the Press‘s Chuck Todd. “And without it, I am afraid that we would lose so much of our individual liberties over time. That’s how dictators get started.”
While Trump’s critics are decrying that the President’s attitudes towards the media, The Intercept‘s Editor-in-Chief Glenn Greenwald put the notion that this purported war with the media didn’t start with Trump. It started with Barack Obama.
On CNN’s Reliable Sources on Sunday, Greenwald told host Brian Stelter that the irony is rich considering the fact that Democrats are suddenly in love with government leaks now that a Republican is in the White House. Under Obama, those same Democrats wanted them jailed and prosecuted.
“If you look at the last eight years,” Greenwald explained. “There has been a very concerted war on not just sources and whistleblowers, but also journalists, implemented by not Donald Trump but by the Obama administration.”
He continued. “More sources prosecuted under the 1917 Espionage Act than in all previous administrations combined. Journalists such as James Rosen at Fox News and Jim Risen at The New York Times and those of us who worked on the Snowden reporting constantly threatened with prosecution or having our phone records subpoenaed and the like. And Democratic officeholders in D.C. were virtually unanimous in the idea that people who leak information that’s classified are villains, they’re traitors, they oughta go to prison.”
Greenwald was one of the few journalists who was in contact with Edward Snowden from late 2012 who leaked classified information from the NSA that exposed many of the tactics used by the federal government to obtain intelligence.
Watch the full clip from CNN below:
.@ggreenwald: “There has been a “concerted war” on whistleblowers and journalists “by the Obama administration” https://t.co/fTuZKMCG1g
— CNN (@CNN) February 19, 2017
