Bob Schieffer: Like Nixon, Trump’s Attempts to Demonize Media Are ‘Very Dangerous’

Friday on MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports,” former CBS’s “Face the Nation” moderator Bob Schieffer said President Donald Trump’s criticisms of the media were “very dangerous,” and reminded him of former President Richard Nixon.

When asked about the president’s attempts demonize the mainstream media, Schieffer said, “About the president, I feel like I’ve seen and heard this movie before. Yesterday I ran across a tape where Richard Nixon—I mean this is true—sat down with Henry Kissinger an Alexander Haig and said the establishment is the enemy, the professors are the enemy, the press is the enemy. Now write that on the blackboard a hundred times. We need to check with Secretary Kissinger to find out if he ever carried that out, but ‘nattering nabobs of negativity’—I remember when we were all called that—so not really very much new on that front.”

He added, “But it is very, very dangerous I think, because when people try to undermine the press, this is one of the foundations of democracy. Democracy depends on having access to independently gathered information that they can compare to the government’s version of events. That’s what sets us off from a totalitarian society. If you don’t have that, you can’t have our kind of democracy, and that’s our assignment. That’s what the founders told us we needed to be doing. I think we have to do that.”

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