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Trump: Speaking directly to the people

Doug Miller Guest Opinion | Hagadone News Network | UPDATED 8 years, 1 month AGO
by Doug Miller Guest Opinion
| December 17, 2016 8:00 PM

I read David Adler’s column regarding President-Elect Trump’s situation with the press in the Dec. 15, 2016 CDA Press and feel that he missed the mark on his premise. David writes he feels Mr. Trump is not a respecter of today’s press and mistakenly harkens back to this country’s framers for support of this position.

While I agree with Mr. Adler’s overall points that we need the press, I feel he is missing the point that Mr. Trump not only feels that way, but he is actually more true and pure to our country’s founders on the issue.

It would not take much debate to establish that the original goal of freedom of the press was to keep the voting public informed. It would take even less time to arrive at the agreement that today’s press is incredibly biased — split along ideological issues they ironically have helped create. They are not fulfilling that goal of simply informing the public.

It reached a crescendo in the latest election with the anti-Trump press clearly treating his opponent, who spent $1 billion and lost, as if she were the anointed winner.

Now as the eve of his term approaches, Mr. Trump essentially asked the media to play fair and properly report his actions to the public to help him heal the country. They told him to pound sand, so he did what anyone in his position would do and is going to focus on speaking directly to the American people. I ask you, David — what could be better than the President speaking directly to the people? If the instant, cheap and widely available communications of today’s internet, Twitter, and a President speaking into cameras beamed across the nation were available when the Constitution was written, I suspect they’d have REQUIRED the President to keep us informed in real time. Directly.

It accomplishes exactly what the Founders wanted — keeping the American public apprised of the President’s actions, his plans and his agenda. Back then the only way to accomplish broad information dissemination was through regular contact with the media. Unfortunately, that route has become a morass of distortion that does the American public no favors.

So now we’re back to basics. One man speaking to a nation. Suddenly in this brave new world there might be no “middleman” distorting what the President says to the people. The liberal press are going to flip!! And clearly so are you, Mr. Adler. In a couple months, you will see Mr. Trump regularly and clearly speaking directly to the American people. He will set goals for himself that will be meaningful and actionable. Then he will go accomplish them. I think we are going to see actual results plainly communicated to us — job numbers, economic indicators changing, energy independence forming.

If the founders of this country could have seen the monstrous impact “the press” has grown into, they’d have picked up their pens to qualify freedom of the press to prevent the abuse of its power. If they’d been able to see just a little bit further in the future to the day Donald Trump took the office of President and short-circuited all the press’ bloated powers to re-establish dialogue directly to the American people, they’d have put their pens down, sat back and had a good laugh. Turns out their document covered the bases quite nicely.

I don’t understand all the hate over direct communication to the people. I’m excited at the prospect of knowing what’s going on in Washington and I suspect a lot of people will feel the same.

• • •

Doug Miller is a resident of Hayden.

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