In a long-overdue move, President Trump orders the cancellation of all New York Times and Washington Post subscriptions across the entirety of the Executive Branch. Announced Thursday by White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham, the cancellation will save our federal employees from being forced to look at this crap when they’re on their lunch breaks. That alone will improve government overnight.
From Fox News:
Agencies will cancel subscriptions to The Washington Post and New York Times, reflecting the president’s long-running issues with the outlets and their reporting on him. White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham announced the decision on Thursday but Trump made the decision days prior.
“Not renewing subscriptions across all federal agencies will be a significant cost saving—hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars will be saved,” Grisham said in an email, according to The Wall Street Journal.
It’s unclear when the subscriptions will be canceled but the White House was reportedly working on the implementation as of Thursday morning.
In a statement obtained by Fox News, PEN America, a non-profit dedicated to defending “free expression,” said Trump’s decision was “a terrifying and self-defeating effort at vindictive information control that reeks of totalitarianism. The White House is proposing to deny federal employees essential and credible reporting necessary to inform their work,” the group said. “The press secretary’s reference to saving taxpayer money makes plain that this proposed maneuver is designed to inflict harm, aimed to deprive the papers of subscription revenue as well as influence, and to extend a political vendetta.”
Ha! The journalism community is really running out of live ammunition when they say that cancelling a couple of newspaper subscriptions “reeks of totalitarianism.” If the New York Times and the Washington Post were cleansed of exactly this sort of nonsense hyperbole, maybe Trump wouldn’t be inspired to nix the subscriptions in the first place.
These two once-respected newspapers have always leaned heavily to the left, but it wasn’t until Trump’s rise that they became nothing more than mouthpieces for the Resistance. While we’re sure some quality reporting sometimes still sneaks into the pages of these rags, it can only be seen as the exception to the rule these days. Until the editors of these papers can prove that they are committed to restoring some semblance of journalistic objectivity, their absence from the government’s subscription list will not be a tragic one.
