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Nineteen months ago, Donald Trump swore an oath to defend the U.S. Constitution. One protection in its First Amendment is the stated guarantee of a press free from government dictates, and an implied responsibility for journalists to be a check on that government’s enormous powers.

Rather than defending or at least respecting that guarantee and that responsibility, Trump has escalated from criticism to incitement: At public appearances he demonizes the reporters who cover his speeches and his crowds. He routinely insists that journalists intentionally craft false reports. As he put it in a July speech to a Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Kansas City, “Don’t believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news. Just remember — what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”

America’s news media — the reporting that journalists promulgate and the decisions they make — aren’t beyond fallibility or reproach; every day journalists get some things right and other things wrong. Tension between presidents and reporters is a staple of most administrations: Journalists rightly objected when President Barack Obama’s Department of Justice, determined to halt leaks, spied on reporters and repeatedly invoked the Espionage Act against their sources.

But Trump’s rants pose a much different, more dangerous threat. He is toying with the power of the presidency in order to provoke one part of the American public against another. At some point such verbal assault encourages ideological extremists to take action. It threatens journalists’ personal safety. And it undercuts that responsibility for a press that’s supposedly free of government control to act as a watchdog on public officials.

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http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/editorials/ct-edit-trump-press-journalists-20180813-story.html