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Writer: Media Did Not Care About Free Speech Until The Election Of Donald Trump

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) - John Daniel Davidson, a writer for the Federalist and National Review, contends the media's obsession for freedom of speech following the election of Donald Trump was absent during the tenure of Barack Obama.

Davidson, during an interview with Chris Stigall on Talk Radio 1210 WPHT, called most news outlets hypocritical in how they compare the incoming and outgoing presidents.

 

"The press is going to have this incredible double standard that they apply to Trump that they never applied to the Obama Administration...It's not Obama's fault, but it was under Obama's watch that we saw a rise in intolerance for free speech, especially on campuses and that really has gone mainstream, but failure, I think more than from the Obama Administration, really is with the mainstream national press. They're the ones that turned a blind eye, time after time, when the Obama Administration would trample on free speech or do things that threatened the First Amendment."

He said they ignored issues and stories involving speech over the last eight years because of the politics involved.

"This is a press that has shown so little interest in free speech, whether it is religious liberty cases that we see around the country, florists and bakers being put out business, Catholic nuns, the Little Sisters of the Poor, being sued by the Obama Administration because they refused to provide contraception that violates their religious beliefs. The press was not on their side and was not interested in any of these people and any of their side of the story. You just didn't see it."

He also believes the press refused to take Donald Trump's candidacy seriously because they never took the time to understand his voters.

"Why did the New York Times and why did major media organizations fail to see that Trump could win northeast Pennsylvania or western Pennsylvania? Why were there so few reporters talking to people in those places? It's because the press isn't really interested in anything but their own narrative and for that narrative to work, free speech is, sort of, a commodity that they can take or leave."

 

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