Washington, Aug 16 (EFE).– More than 300 US newspapers published coordinated editorials Thursday to denounce the reiterated attacks and threats against the press made by President Donald Trump, who has gone so far as to call the news media “the enemy of the American people.”
“To label the press ‘the enemy of the people’ is as un-American as it is dangerous to the civic compact we have shared for more than two centuries,” The Boston Globe, which launched the initiative, wrote in its editorial.
The New York Times, for its part, named its editorial “A Free Press Needs You.”
The New York Times’ column begins with a quote by Thomas Jefferson from 1787 – the year the US Constitution was adopted – who, in a letter to a friend, wrote “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”
The initiative to write coordinated editorials was backed by both local dailies and by newspapers from large cities, including the Houston Chronicle, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the Miami Herald, and The Denver Post.
“We asked editorial boards from around the country – liberal and conservative, large and small – to join us today to address this fundamental threat in their own words,” the Globe wrote.
Donald Trump has repeatedly railed against the US press for citing sources that “don’t exist,” saying they “make up stories” to discredit his work.
In a Thursday morning Tweet, apparently in response to the coordinated editorials, Trump wrote “THE FAKE NEWS MEDIA IS THE OPPOSITION PARTY. It is very bad for our Great Country.”