Chris Wallace: "Trump Is Engaged In The Most Direct, Sustained Assault On Freedom..."

Trump Calls Media The "True Enemy Of The People" The Same Day Bomb Sent To CNN

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/10/29/18037894/donald-trump-twitter-media-enemy-pittsburgh

"Freedom Of The Press Quotations"

Wikiquote

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Freedom_of_the_press

The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.

• Hannah Arendt, Hannah Arendt: From an Interview. Comments made in 1974 during an interview with the French writer Roger Errera and published in October 26, 1978 issue of The NewYork Review of Books Interview. Copyright © 1978 Mary McCarthy West, Trustee. Archived via Wayback Machine of the Internet Archive on February 22, 2017.

"Some degree of abuse is inseparable from the proper use of every thing, and in no instance is this more true than in that of the press. It has accordingly been decided by the practice of the States, that it is better to leave a few of its noxious branches to their luxuriant growth, than, by pruning them away, to injure the vigour of those yielding the proper fruits. And can the wisdom of this policy be doubted by any who reflect that to the press alone, chequered as it is with abuses, the world is indebted for all the triumphs which have been gained by reason and humanity over error and oppression." 
James Madison, Report of 1800, for the quotation source see here

Alan: To state a fact that may be hidden in plain sight... Donald "Non-Disclosure Agreement" Trump "fears investigation of his actions.

Yes, it fact checks.

Jefferson wrote these words to judge John Tyler Washington, June 28, 1804

http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/presidents/thomas-jefferson/letters-of-thomas-jefferson/jefl164.php

• In the First Amendment, the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The Government's power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people.
  • Hugo L. Black, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States (New York Times Company v. United States, 1971).
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• Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell. [...] The guarding of military and diplomatic secrets at the expense of informed representative government provides no real security for our Republic.
  • Hugo L. Black, (New York Times Company v. United States, 1971).

A popular Government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.

• James Madison, Letter to W.T. Barry (1822-08-04).

Thomas Jefferson
Wikipedia
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson

Ben Franklin
Wikiquote
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin

Ben Franklin
Wikiquote
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin



We need a free press. We must have it. It's vital. If you want to preserve - I'm very serious now - if you want to preserve democracy as we know it, you have to have a free and many times adversarial press. And without it, I am afraid that we would lose so much of our individual liberties over time. That's how dictators get started. They get started by suppressing free press. In other words, a consolidation of power. When you look at history, the first thing that dictators do is shut down the press.

• John McCain, as quoted in "McCain says suppressing free press is 'how dictators get started'" (19 February 2017), Reuters

• A free press is one where it's okay to state the conclusion you're led to by the evidence. One reason I'm in hot water is because my colleagues and I at NOW didn't play by the conventional rules of Beltway journalism. Those rules divide the world into Democrats & Republicans, liberals & conservatives, and allow journalists to pretend they have done their job if instead of reporting the truth behind the news, they merely give each side an opportunity to spin the news.
  • Bill Moyers, Speech at the National Conference on Media Reform (15 May 2005)

• This "zeal for secrecy" I am talking about — and I have barely touched the surface — adds up to a victory for the terrorists. When they plunged those hijacked planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon three years ago this morning, they were out to hijack our Gross National Psychology. If they could fill our psyche with fear — as if the imagination of each one of us were Afghanistan and they were the Taliban — they could deprive us of the trust and confidence required for a free society to work. They could prevent us from ever again believing in a safe, decent or just world and from working to bring it about. By pillaging and plundering our peace of mind they could panic us into abandoning those unique freedoms — freedom of speech, freedom of the press — that constitute the ability of democracy to self-correct and turn the ship of state before it hits the iceberg.
• Bill Moyers, Speech to the Society of Professional Journalists (11 September 2004).

A central lesson of science is that to understand complex issues (or even simple ones), we must try to free our minds of dogma and to guarantee the freedom to publish, to contradict, and to experiment. Arguments from authority are unacceptable.

• Carl Sagan Billions and Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millenium (1997) Chapter 14, "The Common Enemy".