So Who's The Real "Enemy of the People"?

Portrait of a younger Henrik Ibsen, one of the first playwrights to adapt domestic drama into his works. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Back in 1882, Norwegian author Henrik Ibsen wrote the play An Enemy of the People, which was about what happened when a local doctor raised questions about the possible contamination of the town baths.  According to Wikipedia, he did it in response to his previous work Ghosts, which was deemed indecent for its references to syphillis and other sexually transmitted diseases.

One hundred and thirty-five years later, President Donald Trump used the name of Ibsen's play on Twitter to describe what he thinks of the mainstream news media.  Conservatives like him have complained for years about the alleged liberal bias coming from the likes of CNN, the "failing" New York Times and the major broadcast TV networks, only not in the strong language the President uses.

Granted, the media's relationship with past Presidents haven't always gone smoothly.  But this President has in his one month of office gone out of his way to stiff-arm their questions about the release of his tax returns, the difficulty in implementing his refugee travel ban and--most seriously--his administration's apparent chumminess with the government of Russia's Vladimir Putin.

So Trump likes to stick it to what he calls "fake news" purveyors every chance he gets.  His news conferences, either by himself or with world leaders, become such contentious free-for-alls that everybody looks bad.  He puts out a list of all the places that have had terrorist attacks in the past few years, then starts wondering why the "lamestream media" didn't cover them as adequately as he'd like.

Trump and his minions aren't above spreading a little "fake news" themselves.  Remember the terrorist attacks on Sweden and Bowling Green, Kentucky?  Neither did we, because they never happened.  But that hasn't stopped the administration from providing more of what we now call "alternative facts".

Most Presidents get their daily dose of information through the classified briefing they get every morning.  Not Trump, whose relations with the intelligence community has soured to the point where the Fox News Channel (which is where he got that idea about Sweden) serves as his window on the world.  Also, his assistant Steve Bannon used to run the Breitbart news site.

President Trump, through his words and deeds, is hell bent on making a mockery of the First Amendment through his takedown of the news media.  With all that baggage he carries and what's at stake, it's imperative that the media uncover as many real (not "alternative") facts about him as possible before he decides that he alone can fix this.

Henrik Ibsen could not have imagined that, more than a century after An Enemy of the People was first written and performed, that a President of the United States would use his work to denigrate his profession.  Or is it really just Trump describing himself?