Fox News anchor Chris Wallace warns viewers
Fox News anchor Chris Wallace cautioned his colleagues and the network's viewers Sunday that President Trump's latest attack on the media had gone too far.
“Look, we're big boys. We criticize presidents. They want to criticize us back, that's fine,” Wallace said Sunday morning on “Fox & Friends.” “But when he said that the fake news media is not my enemy, it's the enemy of the American people, I believe that crosses an important line.”
The “Fox & Friends” anchors had shown a clip of Trump recounting that past presidents, including Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, had fought with the press. They then asked Wallace whether Trump's fraught relationship with the media was a big deal.
In response, Wallace told his colleagues that Jefferson had also once written the following: “And were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”
Context was important, Wallace said. All presidents fight with the media, but Trump had taken it a step further in making them out to be “the enemy,” he added.
“Yes, presidents have always had — and politicians have always had — problems with the press. They want good press. The press doesn't always give it to them,” Wallace said. “But what Jefferson [was saying] is, despite all of our disputes, that to the functioning of a free and fair democracy, you must have an independent press.”
Trump's contentious relationship with the press has again been in the spotlight in recent days after the president repeatedly attacked the media as “fake news” in several tweets. In one widely shared tweet on Friday, Trump said the media was “not my enemy” but “the enemy of the American People!”
In it, Trump tagged the New York Times, CNN and the broadcast news networks NBC, ABC and CBS. He did not mention Fox News, which has usually been exempted from his anger toward the media — a fact that Wallace acknowledged Sunday.