Unfreedom of the Press, by Mark R. Levin

With Mark Levin, you can always count on a conservative perspective and an informed, passionate, and thorough treatment of the issues at hand.  This is certainly true of Unfreedom of the Press.  Levin is no knee-jerk defender of President Trump, but he certainly recognizes the coordinated schemes of the media to embarrass and, they wish, unseat Trump.

As you will expect with Levin, if you've read his books or listened to his radio show, he doesn't simply report on and react to the news of the day.  Unfreedom of the Press is wide-ranging, but a couple of themes stand out.  The biases of the press, while amplified during the age of Trump, are nothing new.  Levin recounts the failures of the New York Times specifically.  While Stalin was systematically oppressing and starving millions of people in the Ukraine in the 1930s, the Soviets tried to keep it under wraps.  Word did leak out, but somehow the NYT kept it off their pages.  Similarly, even though the nature and extent of the Holocaust were known, for many years Americans did not learn of it because a compliant press, led by the New York Times, kept it off the front pages, if it was reported at all.

The internet and social media have, of course, revolutionized the way people receive and disperse information.  But big media still dominates and they do what they can to shape the story line.  Months after the publication of Levin's book, we heard recordings of NYT editorial meetings in which editors expressly discussed their strategies to discredit Trump.  (The Russian collusion narrative fell apart, so now they were going to shift to the "Trump is a racist" narrative.)  Levin must have been thinking, "There's another chapter for the second edition!"

People on the left and in the mainstream stress will hate this book.  The rest of us will see that Levin is right: Trump not only has to work against the Democrats to accomplish anything in his agenda, he has to fight the misrepresentations and opposition coming at him from the newspapers and "news" networks.