Trump officials like Sarah Huckabee Sanders joining network TV brings us closer to state-sponsored media
This week, former press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders joined Fox News as a contributor. Andrew McCabe, former FBI director who was fired for lying to federal investigators, was also hired on as a CNN contributor. Sean Spicer, another of Trump’s former press secretaries, announced he joined reality television show Dancing With the Stars. Are you seeing pattern here?
In response, the American people rolled their eyes and groaned wearily. But in truth, as an American, none of this sits well with me. Sure, you could argue that these are people important to analysing and understanding the Trump presidency with an insider perspective, but how can you expect people known for lying to protect a celebrity president to be honest in their analysis?
Ask yourself: do you really want to watch a man who set the foundation for holding immigrant children in cages indefinitely tango around to upbeat pop music? Do you trust a man who was ousted from the Federal Bureau of Investigation for breaking protocol by speaking to reporters on the Clinton Email scandal? Do women trust a woman who said all women that claimed Donald Trump sexually assaulted them were liars to tell us the truth? I don’t, and you shouldn’t either.
We have a literal reality television star with no previous political experience in the White House, and what these past three years of the Trump Administration should have proven is that news and media should stay separate from politics. If not, you get a president that made himself famous through real estate, a fake college, and a failed line of mail-order steaks, calling himself “the chosen one” and trying to buy Greenland.
Living up to his television star past, the Trump Administration is filled with drama and storylines that are nearly impossible to believe. Journalism should not be anything like the Trump Administration, so including Sanders as a Fox contributor will only blur those lines further.
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What adopting McCabe and Sanders as regular contributors effectively does is encourage the public to think that they can’t, and shouldn’t, trust the media. Journalism is meant to educate the public on what is happening locally, nationally, and globally, not serve as a propaganda outlet for partisan political views. It is literally the job of the press secretary to manipulate how the media portrays president Trump, and now we have one of the most recent Trump press secretaries as part of the media? I don’t think so.
We must ask ourselves: how can the American people trust media outlets that have notorious liars as paid contributors to daily news networks? Why would Americans trust and listen to people that enabled, participated, lied about, and defended the worst actions of the Trump Administration?
It’s a simple answer: they can’t. Having people like McCabe, Sanders and Spicer in the media is the truest definition of “fake news”, and both CNN and Fox are ruining their own credibility by blurring the boundaries between journalism and politics.
