Reports today say Donald Trump will order lowering of flags
to mark the mass shootings at the Annapolis, Md., newspaper as he has done for most other mass shootings. Reports over the weekend said he’d declined such a request from the mayor of Annapolis Whether he changed course or not, his animosity toward newspapers is real, as is that of his followers.

Trump’s press spokesman, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, seems in this  Talking Points Memo story to suggest this is not a changing of course. So are we to have another “fake news” debate?

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The president’s hostility toward news media and robust exercise of the 1st Amendment (except to be used as a tool of discrimination in the name of religion) is certainly not fake. Nor is that animosity fake among his followers. Read here the outing of a conservative Republican who appears to be behind a Twitter account that seemed to want to blame a newspaper, the Times-Picayune in this case, for inciting violence.

Regular readers of the Blog will remember that the well-armed Stu Soffer, the Jefferson County Republican Trump fan, engaged in a little  media blaming himself the other day. He followed the Fox News line of suggesting that some media might be OK, but others that hold a point of view they dislike, might somehow be in a different league.Dangerous stuff from the man with the derringer. And he is not alone.

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