Dan Rather Just Told Reporters What to Do in the Trump Era
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Long-time journalist Dan Rather took to Facebook on Sunday to express what "extraordinary measures" must be used in "extraordinary times," as he put it, when the administration of President Donald Trump uses Orwellian terms to twist the truth.
Rather referred to White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer's demonstrably false claim that Trump's inauguration was the most well-attended in history and to the subsequent defense of those falsehoods by Kellyanne Conway, the counselor to Trump, as "alternative facts" in an interview with NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday.
It's only the third day since Trump ascended to the presidency, and it's becoming clear how the new administration will communicate with the American people — and by extension the world.
Rather encouraged journalists to press Republican lawmakers on the new administration's lies and to end interviews with them if they continue to dodge questions.
The new administration will face tough questions in coming weeks and months:
- How does it plan to transform America's health care system without depriving people of affordable treatment and prescriptions?
- How will it deal with intelligence agencies that it has routinely criticized?
- How will it engage with a press that it has used as a punching bag?
Spicer and Conway are already being called out by the press for their role in enabling a gross inaccuracy from the start of the Trump presidency.
Spicer slammed the press in his first White House press briefing, calling its conduct "shameful and wrong" for largely accurate comparisons between President Trump's inauguration and that of President Barack Obama's in 2009 and Saturday's Women's March on Washington.