Fox News host Chris Wallace raked Donald Trump over the coals tonight for his treatment of political journalists, who he has called ‘the enemy of the people’ and a more potent ‘opposition party’ than the Democrats.
Trump’s regular verbal broadsides against reporters is well known.
He has moved to temporarily suspend two reporters’ White House credentials, and his use of social media to demonize his First Amendment-protected antagonists has had the most stinging impact on the profession in generations.
‘I believe that President Trump is engaged in the most direct, sustained assault on freedom of the press in our history,’ Fox News Sunday anchor Chris Wallace told an audience in Washington.
Speaking at the Newseum, an 11-year-old landmark set to shutter its doors December 31, Wallace broke ranks with most of his Fox News colleagues to deliver an unmistakable slap at Trump.
‘He has done everything he can to undercut the media, to try and delegitimize us, and I think his purpose is clear: to raise doubts when we report critically about him and his administration, that we can be trusted,’ he said.
‘Back in 2017, he tweeted something that said far more about him than it did about us: “The fake news media is not my enemy. It is the enemy of the American people”.’
Twice in the past two months Trump has unfavorably compared Wallace to his father, the late television journalist Mike Wallace.
Last month he vented on Twitter after Wallace grilled House Minority Whip Steve Scalise about the president’s impending impeachment and said he had ‘very badly mischaracterize[d]’ the testimony of several anti-Trump hearing witnesses.
‘@SteveScalise blew the nasty & obnoxious Chris Wallace (will never be his father, Mike!) away on Chris’s lowest rated (unless I’m on) morning show,’ Trump tweeted.
‘This kind of dumb and unfair interview would never have happened in the @FoxNews past,’ he added.
Wallace responded that Trump’s combative slams on reporters have cost the nation’s press corps much of its public credibility.
‘Let’s be honest: The president’s attacks have done some damage,’ he said.
‘A Freedom Forum Institute poll, associated here with the Newseum, this year found that 29 per cent of Americans, almost a third of all of us, think the First Amendment goes too far. And 77 percent, three quarters, say that fake news is a serious threat to our democracy.’
The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, written in 1789, guarantees protection against government intrusion on the freedoms of speech, religion, assembly, and petitioning leaders.
Wallace said Trump has also given his counterparts in other countries license to wage their own heavy-handed wars against journalists.
‘Intimidation and vilification of the press is now a global phenomenon. We don’t have to look far for evidence of that,’ he said.