Mark Levin, author of Unfreedom of the Press, told Breitbart News that America’s “mass media” is “destroying freedom of the press,” offering his remarks on Thursday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow.
“What do we really know about these people in the press, these news organizations, and their ideology?” asked Levin, sharing his rationale for writing Unfreedom of the Press. “Isn’t it time people can go to one place to see the facts of what’s going on with the press? Because what do we really know? It’s an opaque business. It’s the most opaque business that exists. With everybody else, you kind of know what’s going on in their companies [or] what’s going on in their unions. It’s not so with the media. These newsrooms are really secretive.”
Levin added, “I’ve concluded that the mass media in this country is destroying freedom of the press. They’re two different things, you have a mass media and freedom of the press. Freedom of the press belongs to we the people. It’s why it’s in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the First Amendment. That belongs to us.”
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Levin continued, “What’s the purpose of freedom of the press? The purpose of freedom of the press is to undergird freedom of speech. The press is about us communicating with each other. Us knowing what’s going on. Us making determinations about our government, our society, our culture, [and] our future. But when you have a Democratic Party press, you can’t tell the difference between the Democratic Party and most of the hosts and journalists today. You have a Democratic Party press that is of a progressive mindset and groupthink and pack mentality , and now, even more than before, has embraced social activism — as ultimately progressives do — to fundamentally transform our society and our culture.”
“It is the media destroying the First Amendment, not the president [and] not the government,” determined Levin.
Levin addressed left-wing and partisan Democrat narratives framing President Donald Trump as a “threat” to the First Amendment and press freedom. CNN’s Jim Acosta and April Ryan, marketing themselves as non-partisan and politically objective journalists, wrote books entitled The Enemy of the People: A Dangerous Time to Tell the Truth in America and Under Fire: Reporting from the Front Lines of the Trump White House, respectively.
“I have a chapter in my book where I talk about the great threats in the past, what presidents have actually done to journalists and the media, and I talk about John Adams and the Sedition Act of 1790,” stated Levin. “You know he locked up journalists and shut down some newspapers? During the Civil War, his secretary of war shut down over 300 newspapers and locked up journalists. I write about Woodrow Wilson — the so-called great progressive — who put in a new Sedition Act in 1918. He locked up journalists [and] political opponents. I write about Franklin Roosevelt, who unleashed the IRS against newspapers who disagreed with him, [as] did his wife Eleanor. I write about John Kennedy, who gave information to press people about other press people, using their FBI files and the IRS. And of course, we know Barack Obama, what he did with James Risen of the New York Times, James Rosen of Fox, [and] 20 AP reporters.”
Levin concluded, “This president has done nothing to the media. This president calls them out. They don’t like him. You’ve got Jim Acosta, who as a fraud, writing a whole book, [claiming], ‘We’ve never seen anything like this, before,’ as they make an enormous amount of money, and write their books like they’re really under threat. There have been presidents who have really laid into the media. This president verbally calls them out. He is no threat, whatsoever, to press freedom.”
CNN’s Brian Stelter regularly frames Trump as a threat to press freedom while simultaneously lobbying for digital censorship of conservative, nationalist, and otherwise dissident news media outlets and figures.
Breitbart News Daily broadcasts live on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter @rkraychik.
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