I don’t know, when I grew up my momma always told me that if I couldn’t say something nice about someone don’t say anything at all. So far that has kept me from saying anything about our President.
Since the 2016 elections I’ve tried to tell myself to have faith in the fact that we have a system in this country that will prevent the people who get elected from doing too much damage. That faith is being challenged day by day.
This morning I read, in a small sidebar on page 5, that the man in the picture above sent out another (Oh Geez, not another) tweet.
At first when I read it I laughed and told Cathy it sounded to me like he was saying “If you can’t say anything nice about me, you can’t say anything at all!”
I know, he isn’t saying he can keep reporters from reporting. He is just saying “If I get my way only 10% of you can come where I am while I’m talking. If you hear anything not nice about me anyplace else and write it, you’re wrong, and you’re lying!”
Then I turned to page 7 and read about the tariffs on Canadian newsprint (the paper your paper is printed on). In January a new tariff raised the cost of that paper by 6.53 percent. In March an anti dumping penalty added as much as 22.16 percent. (Hmmm, a tax on paper, I seem to recall that caused trouble some time ago.)
Nearly 80 percent of our newspapers are printed on Canadian newsprint. Newsprint amounts to nearly 10 percent of a paper’s cost. Some papers have had to lay off up to 50 reporters, and many small town papers are having to shut down. The cost of your local is about to go up, or it may have to shut down.
We may have thought the President’s war on the media was limited to shouting “fake media” when he didn’t like what people said about him. Now it looks like he wants not only to stop the reporters, he is working with Wilber (Tariffs? No big deal) Ross to make sure they don’t have any more paper to print on.
If you have noticed that newspapers are disappearing and it upset you, hold on.
Not that he’ll notice. The only thing he uses newspapers for is a prop.