We are having a culture that does not respect life from conception to natural death and this president gave the most — this Manhattan male billionaire, who was pro-choice most of his adult life gave the impassioned defense of life that anybody has ever heard coming from a presidential podium.
.. WALLACE: And chief strategist Stephen Bannon went much further. Quote, “The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while.”
But Bannon wasn’t finished. “The media has zero integrity, zero intelligence and no hard work. You’re the opposition party. Not the Democratic Party. You’re the opposition party.”
Kellyanne, do you understand how offensive that is?
.. CONWAY: I understand how offensive it was to never be taken seriously that Donald Trump could be elected president. On great days, we were ignored. On most days, we were mocked.
WALLACE: A lot of us — a lot of us reported on it fairly, and that’s a different issue.
CONWAY: No, no, no, it is the issue, because it extends into this presidency, Chris. You can’t put a piece of tissue paper between the way Donald Trump was covered as the Republican candidate, the Republican nominee, the president-elect, and the president. It’s all the same. It’s an anti-Trump screed. It’s completely disrespectful to the Office of the President.
Why — look at what happened this week. Nobody is interested in learning the policies. It’s just —
WALLACE: I’ve been asking about policies today. I asked you about the vetting.
CONWAY: Well, look —
WALLACE: I asked about Mexico. I asked you about the Supreme Court.
(CROSSTALK)
WALLACE: Those are legitimate questions, are they not?
.. WALLACE: Let me get if I may to the real point, politicians complain about bad press. I think you have some legitimate complaints about bad press. The First Amendment protects the press. We are in the Constitution.
And it’s offensive, quite frankly, that have folks — any politician, but folks who have been in the White House for a week lecture us about what we should and shouldn’t do and that we should keep our mouth shut.
.. CONWAY: — what my colleague Steve Bannon is saying is, why don’t you talk last and listen to America more. Let me tell you something, I know what he meant. I worked with him everybody. The media failed to learn America. Donald Trump prove something that the media failed to do, which is he understood America. The idea that we were never taken seriously —
.. WALLACE: — we have zero intelligence and zero integrity, and that we shouldn’t keep our mouths shut is offensive.
CONWAY: I think it’s called listen more.
.. And let me just say something else happens. It’s the way that everything is cherry picked. Bias media coverage it’s easy to detect. It frankly helps us because this was such an elite rejection of election, where the establishment, the elites were all rejected by the voters.
It turns out they’re a heck of a lot more of them than us, Chris. And that’s how we won. Why is that relevant? It’s relevant because people — who is cleaning house? Which one of the first network to get rid of these people who said things that just weren’t true.
Talk about fake news, talk about alternative facts, what happened last week? I went on three network Sunday shows. I spoke for 35 minutes on three network Sunday shows. You know what got picked? The fact that I said alternative facts, not the fact that I ripped a new one to some of those hosts for never covering the facts that matter to America’s women, 16.1 million women in poverty as we sit there, the 12.4 million who have no health insurance. Everybody should feel outraged.
.. The billions of dollars we have spent as a nation on public education, only to have millions of kids trapped in schools that fail them and never really promote and protect their intelligence and prepare them for the world that they all deserve. They shouldn’t be restricted by the zip code where they live. They should be lifted up.
.. There’s no question that when you look at the contributions made by the media, money contributions, they went to Hillary Clinton. We have all the headlines, people should be embarrassed. Not one network person has been let go. Not one silly political analyst and pundit who talked smack all day long about Donald Trump has been let go
.. Who’s the first editorial — the first blogger that will be left out that embarrassed his or her outlet? We know all their names. I’m too polite to call them by name. But they know who they are, and they’re all wondering, will I be the first to go?
The election was three months ago. None of them have been let go. If this were a real business, if the mainstream media were a thriving private sector business that actually turn a profit, which is not true of many of our newspapers, Chris, 20 percent of the people would be gone. They embarrassed, they failed to protect their shareholders and their board members and their colleagues.
.. WALLACE: And let me say, you didn’t rip me a new one.
Reporters without Borders: Country Ranking
The degree of freedom available to journalists in 180 countries is determined by pooling the responses of experts to a questionnaire devised by RSF. This qualitative analysis is combined with quantitative data on abuses and acts of violence against journalists during the period evaluated. The criteria evaluated in the questionnaire are pluralism, media independence, media environment and self-censorship, legislative framework, transparency, and the quality of the infrastructure that supports the production of news and information.
1 / Pluralism [indicator scorePlur]
Measures the degree to which opinions are represented in the media.
2/ Media independence [indicator scoreInd]
Measures the degree to which the media are able to function independently of sources of political, governmental, business and religious power and influence.
3/ Environment and self-censorship [indicator scoreEA]
Analyses the environment in which news and information providers operate.
4/ Legislative framework [indicator scoreCL]
Measures the impact of the legislative framework governing news and information activities.
5/ Transparency [indicator scoreTra]
Measures the transparency of the institutions and procedures that affect the production of news and information.
6/ Infrastructure [indicator scoreInf]
Measures the quality of the infrastructure that supports the production of news and information.
A seventh indicator based on data gathered about abuses and acts of violence against journalists and media during the period evaluated is also factored into the calculation.
7/ Abuses [indicator scoreExa]
Measures the level of abuses and violence.
Each indicator is given a score between 0 and 100.
If Donald Trump Targets Journalists, Thank Obama
Over the past eight years, the administration has prosecuted nine cases involving whistle-blowers and leakers, compared with only three by all previous administrations combined.
It has repeatedly used the Espionage Act, a relic of World War I-era red-baiting, not to prosecute spies but to go after government officials who talked to journalists.
Under Mr. Obama, the Justice Department and the F.B.I. have spied on reporters by monitoring their phone records, labeled one journalist an unindicted co-conspirator in a criminal case for simply doing reporting and issued subpoenas to other reporters to try to force them to reveal their sources and testify in criminal cases.
.. the war on leaks and other efforts to control information was “the most aggressive I’ve seen since the Nixon administration, when I was one of the editors involved in The Washington Post’s investigation of Watergate.”
.. Mr. Obama’s record of going after both journalists and their sources has set a dangerous precedent that Mr. Trump can easily exploit.
.. before the George W. Bush administration, only one person was ever convicted under the Espionage Act for leaking —
.. “You got the impression from the tone of the government officials that they wanted to take a zero-tolerance approach to leaks.”
.. the Obama administration won a ruling from the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in my case that determined that there was no such thing as a “reporter’s privilege” — the right of journalists not to testify about their confidential sources in criminal cases.
.. That court ruling could result, for example, in a reporter’s being quickly jailed for refusing to comply with a subpoena from the Trump administration’s Justice Department to reveal the C.I.A. sources used for articles on the agency’s investigation into Russian hacking during the 2016 presidential election.
Sean Spicer Says Donald Trump Is A ‘Champion’ Of First Amendment
“He’s going to be very forceful, but he understands the role of the press,” Spicer said.
Sean Spicer, Donald Trump’s pick for press secretary, rushed to his new boss’ defense on Friday, contending that the president-elect is a “champion” of First Amendment rights.
“I mean look at his use of the First Amendment, he loves the First Amendment,” Spicer said with a laugh on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
Many have expressed concern that Trump is intent on weakening the First Amendment due to his assaults on the “dishonest media,” cries many of his supporters have echoed.
Trump blacklisted nearly a dozen news organizations from his rallies by the end of his campaign, and he promised to “open up our libel laws” so it would be easier to sue news outlets.