By Dan Calabrese ——Bio and Archives--August 7, 2018
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All told, 43 percent of self-identified Republicans said that they believed “the president should have the authority to close news outlets engaged in bad behavior.” Only 36 percent disagreed with that statement. When asked if Trump should close down specific outlets, including CNN, The Washington Post, and The New York Times, nearly a quarter of Republicans (23 percent) agreed and 49 percent disagreed. Republicans were far more likely to take a negative view of the media. Forty-eight percent of them said they believed “the news media is the enemy of the American people” (just 28 percent disagreed) while nearly four out of every five (79 percent) said that they believed “the mainstream media treats President Trump unfairly.”Some of this, I think, is probably people who think there should be legal consequences for publishing flat-out falsehoods, as well as for poorly sourced nonsense that could have been easily identified as false if anyone was interested in checking. There is such a thing as libel, of course, but as Sarah Palin found out earlier this year it’s very hard to win a libel suit even when the media outlet was obviously both dishonest and malicious.
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