The press is not the enemy of the people, but it sometimes acts like it

Editor’s note: The opinions in this article are the author’s, as published by our content partner, and do not necessarily represent the views of MSN or Microsoft.

It is a stupid slur to say the media is “the enemy of the people.” Coming from the president of the United States, it is also irresponsible and chilling.

Hundreds of our colleagues in the media today are standing in unison against President Trump’s angry anti-media bluster — bluster that has spurred some Trump supporters to threaten and heckle journalists. Although we find the groupthink here a bit unseemly for opinion pages, which are supposed to be independent voices, we agree with these editorials that Trump’s rhetoric is dumb and harmful.

But that can’t be all. We encourage our colleagues to follow up on today’s show of solidarity with some introspection. Specifically, we journalists should all ask, “What are we doing that allows Trump to convince so many of ‘the people’ that we are their ‘enemy?'”

For starters, we journalists should stop attacking the people we are supposed to be informing.

“If you put everyone’s mouths together in this video, you’d get a full set of teeth,” one Politico reporter wrote of a Trump rally in Florida. The reporter apologized for the comment, but it already served to confirm the suspicion among working-class Republicans that the prestige press hates them.

There was Katy Tur of MSNBC, who went around a Trump event asking “gotcha” questions of ordinary Americans excited to get $1,000 bonus and a lower tax rate. The clear message was that these people were too dumb to realize the tax cut and any concomitant bonuses were peanuts.

We also note CNN’s crusades to punish, threaten, and deny platforms to those whose speech goes beyond the CNN-drawn boundaries of permissible dissent. In recent days, some CNN reporters have decided their job is to lobby social media platforms to kick off conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. They’ve succeeded with the largest platforms, and bragged about it.

Such lobbying was odd behavior for a media outlet, and it reminded of us the time CNN sicced its investigative resources on the creator an idiotic GIF of Trump “body slamming CNN.” When CNN reporters found the anonymous troll who posted the image, they threatened in print that they would “publish his identity should” he repeat such “ugly behavior.”

Alex Jones and anonymous Twitter trolls are hardly sympathetic figures, but that doesn’t turn CNN’s campaigns to “dox” or de-platform them into journalism. We worry about the slippery slope here. Much of the media believe there’s no valid reason to oppose gay marriage. Buzzfeed recently ran an attack on the Christian views of TV hosts, having explained that on gay marriage “there are no two sides.”

We all remember the reporters who scoured Indiana until they found a pizzamaker who was uninterested in catering a gay wedding, and was then made a national whipping boy of the pizza shop.

So the average religious conservative who has seen this media behavior is justified if she’s wondering when a CNN, BuzzFeed, or MSNBC reporter might show up to ruin her life for holding the “wrong” opinions, whether on guns, immigration, marriage, or even tax cuts.

Then there are the times the mainstream media outright lies about conservative or working-class people. Katie Couric produced a documentary that dishonestly edited out the arguments of gun-rights supporters to make it look like she had stumped them and left them speechless. Vox.com ran a poll about voters’ immigration views and hid the fact that “taking away jobs” was voters’ No. 1 concern. Why? Probably because Vox wanted to push the idea that racism rather than “economic anxiety” drove immigration worries.

Finally, when you see the New York Times hire a writer who regularly and publicly professes her hatred of white men, it seems the Times thinks such hatred is fine.

So the media — from the perspective of a working-class white person, a Trump supporter, or a conservative — really can look like an adversary, and a dangerous one, with the power to destroy your life, silence you, or cost you your job. This isn’t the media holding the powerful to account. It’s the media lazily abusing those with unpopular views.

Trump should stop calling the media the enemy of the people. And the media should stop doing the things that give Trump’s attacks credence.