When the President Calls You the Enemy

People have disliked the media since the creation of the media, and why not? It’s much easier to blame the people holding authority accountable instead of the authority itself. It’s much easier to blame the people bringing unpopular truths to light than to acknowledge what’s actually true. The media has been a safe scapegoat for generations, and likely will be for generations to come.

That being said, an alarming shift has taken place over the past few years; instead of journalists being passively blamed for all of life’s problems, they have been more actively threatened. It’s not just the media’s fault — the media needs to pay for their faults.

The marker of when this shift took place is painfully clear. I noticed it as a journalism student. No one thought twice about my college major until 2015. Suddenly, my career path was a problem. Suddenly, I needed to “rethink” my choice of joining a “dishonest” industry.

2015 was the year Donald Trump’s campaign took off. He sounded off at the media constantly, dubbing them “fake news” and regularly calling journalists “the enemy of the people.” He tweeted cartoons that depicted violence against reporters. Naturally, he was unapologetic about all of it.

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