Global Times

World: Trump reveals ‘Fake News Awards’ winners

GOP senator accuses president of using Stalinist language to ‘slur’ press

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Donald Trump unveiled the winners of his much-touted “Fake News Awards” late Wednesday, hours after a maverick senator from the president’s own Republican party accused him of employing Stalinist language to “slur” and undermine the free press.

Arizona lawmaker Jeff Flake levelled the broadside in an address from the Senate floor earlier in the day, delivering a one-two punch after veteran Republican John McCain penned an op-ed assailing Trump’s spoof awards.

The brash Republican president announced his top-ten 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 website 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 the senator, an outspoken Trump critic who is not seeking reelection 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.”

“2017 was a year which saw the truth – objective, empirical, evidence-based truth – more battered and abused than any time in the history of our country, at the hands of the biggest figure in our government,” Flake charged.

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 press.

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 “the most corrupt & biased of the Mainstream Media.”

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