US President Donald Trump unveiled the winners of his much-touted “Fake News Awards” late on Wednesday, hours after a maverick senator from the president’s own party accused him of employing Stalinist language to “slur” and undermine the free press.
US Senator Jeff Flake leveled the broadside in an address from the US Senate floor earlier in the day, delivering a one-two punch after veteran Republican US Senator John McCain penned an op-ed assailing Trump’s spoof awards.
The brash Republican president announced his top-10 list — which included his regular targets CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Post — using his preferred medium of Twitter, linking to a list published on the Republican Party’s Web site that crashed minutes after his big reveal.
Flake slammed what he called the president’s dangerous disregard for the truth, and his designation of the mainstream news media as an “enemy of the people.”
“Mr President, it is a testament to the condition of our democracy that our own president uses words infamously spoken by Joseph Stalin to describe his enemies,” said Flake, an outspoken Trump critic who is not seeking re-election this year. “When a figure in power reflexively calls any press that does not suit him ‘fake news,’ it is that person who should be the figure of suspicion, not the press.”
Turning the tables on the president, Flake accused him of leading an “unrelenting daily assault” on the free press, even as his White House coined the term “alternative facts” — “as justification for what used to be called old-fashioned falsehoods.”
Of the “awards,” Flake had said “it beggars belief that an American president would engage in such a spectacle, yet here we are,” and urged his fellow lawmakers to take a stand in support of the media.
At loggerheads with much of the US news media since his election, Trump finally doled out his “Fake News Awards” after weeks of speculation, recognizing what he had called on Twitter “the most corrupt & biased of the Mainstream Media.”
Nobel-prize winning economist Paul Krugman, who writes a regular opinion column — not news articles — for the New York Times, nabbed the No. 1 spot.
The administration said he merited the award for writing “on the day of President Trump’s historic, landslide victory that the economy would never recover.”
Following the former reality star’s stunning rise to power, Krugman had written that Trump’s inexperience on economic policy and unpredictability risked further damaging the weak global economy.
While Flake’s combative stance was not echoed by mainstream Republicans, it was mirrored by his Arizona colleague and fellow Trump critic McCain in an opinion piece for the Washington Post entitled “Mr. President, stop attacking the press.”
“Whether Trump knows it or not, these efforts are being closely watched by foreign leaders who are already using his words as cover as they silence and shutter one of the key pillars of democracy,” McCain said.
Citing the Committee to Protect Journalists, McCain said that last year was one of the most dangerous years on record for the profession, with 262 journalists jailed over their work — 21 of them on charges of “fake news.”
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