Yahoo — “Mr. President, back off,” Greta Van Susteren said as she wrapped her MSNBC program addressing Donald Trump having taken to calling the press the “enemy” of the American people.
Meanwhile, over at her former network, Fox News Channel, Trump was applauded and defended for the remark by Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly. O’Reilly went with the argument the press is aligned with “with a political movement” and therefore is no longer objective or free. Hannity chose an even more incendiary argument, announcing the press has “declared war” on Trump, while, via graphic, he took it further, proclaiming the “Propaganda Media” had declared war on “America.”
Meanwhile, over at MSNBC, Van Susteren was suggesting journalists need to engage in “a vigorous self-examination of how we do our jobs, because getting it wrong or exaggerating just is not an option.” She did not specify whether this applied to Fox News Channel.
In her argument, Van Susteren referenced Trump’s weekend “last night in Sweden” re-election campaign speech snafu, in which he appeared to mistake a segment on Tucker Carlson’s FNC program about an in-question documentary, for breaking news.
“Every one of your mistakes or reckless tweets has a huge cost,” Van Susteren warned. (Hours earlier Tucker Carlson acknowledged Trump needs to “always be accurate and clear” but blamed the media for focusing on what Trump said, rather than what he meant to say.)
“You have a powerful platform, but it is dead wrong to rev up your loyal base with incorrect, generalized and wide-sweeping inflammatory statements about the entire media,” Van Susteren told Trump.
