"It is a failing newspaper," Donald Trump said of The New York Times, which his lawyer threatened to sue on Thursday. | AP Photo Trump crowds rain hate on the press It's getting dark out there.

CINCINNATI — As the traveling press corps filed into Donald Trump’s rally here on Thursday night, a crowd of 15,000 people showered it in boos, chanting, “Tell the truth” and “CNN sucks.” A man standing directly in front of the press pen shouted that reporters were “puppets” and those near him joined in chanting the word.

As the Republican nominee has resorted to more extreme denunciations of the press in recent days, his supporters have followed suit. Chants of “CNN sucks” have become commonplace at Trump's rallies this week and members of the traveling press were called “whores” and “press-titutes” as they filed out of a Thursday afternoon rally in West Palm Beach. Minutes before, Trump had accused reporters of participating in a vast globalist conspiracy against his campaign and American workers.


Crowds that once booed and shouted at the press mainly at Trump’s prompting — when he would decry them as “dishonest” and “scum” or demand that television cameras pan his crowds — have now begun spontaneously targeting the press on their own, at a scale not yet seen in this campaign, or any in memory on American soil.

Kindled by months of Trump’s relentless efforts to denigrate and discredit critical coverage of his campaign, the vitriol of his supporters is spilling over at a time when Trump is condemning an avalanche of reports about him allegedly sexually assaulting women or making lewd comments about them. In response, Trump is making increasingly conspiratorial claims about the relationship between reporters and his political opponents.

“The most powerful weapon deployed by the Clintons is the corporate media,” Trump said in West Palm Beach on Thursday. “The reporters collaborate and conspire directly with the Clinton campaign on helping her win the election all over.”

Speaking before Trump, former federal prosecutor and New York Rudy Giuliani accused “news networks” of participating in a “conspiracy” and falsely claimed that newspapers were not covering stories from the WikiLeaks Clinton campaign dumps on their front pages. In fact, the nation’s three largest newspapers, the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, among many others, have all published stories on their front pages, and POLITICO has run dozens of reports on the email dump.

This week, Trump has begun claiming that mainstream media outlets no longer conduct journalism. “Reporters who work for these outlets like Washington Post or The New York Times may think of themselves as journalists, but they’re actually just cogs in a corporate, political machine,” he said on Tuesday evening in Panama City, Florida.

"It is a failing newspaper," Trump said of the Times, which his lawyer threatened to sue on Thursday after the paper reported two women's claims that he had touched them inappropriately. "Third rate people. I'm telling you. Third rate. Bad people. Bad people. Sick people!"

On Thursday, the Committee to Protect Journalists took the unprecedented step of condemning a major party nominee in an American presidential election.

“His intent and his disregard for the constitutional free press principle are clear,” wrote CPJ chairmain Sandra Mims Rowe, in a statement. “A Trump presidency would represent a threat to press freedom in the United States, but the consequences for the rights of journalists around the world could be far more serious. Any failure of the United States to uphold its own standards emboldens dictators and despots to restrict the media in their own countries.”

