Submitted by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

Thursday afternoon’s press conference was perhaps the most memorable moment of Donald Trump’s presidency so far. Trump’s blistering attack on the media was quite a spectacle, but the truth is that it was desperately needed. For decades, the mainstream media has dominated political discourse in this country no matter who has been in control of the White House or Congress. They have become masters of guiding and shaping public opinion, and in recent years they have completely discarded any pretense of being “unbiased” or “objective”. These monolithic media organizations relentlessly push the progressive agenda of their owners (the global elite), and that is why the “news” always seems to be just about the same no matter which network it is coming from. Their monopoly is slowly being broken by the rise of the alternative media, but the truth is that most Americans still rely on just a handful of ultra-powerful media organizations for their news.

So when Trump brutally attacked the mainstream media at his press conference on Thursday, millions upon millions of Americans greatly rejoiced, because they finally got what was coming to them. And then on Friday, Trump posted a message to Twitter calling the New York Times, NBC, ABC, CBS and CNN “the enemy of the American people”…

After Donald Trump’s surprise election victory in November, many in the mainstream media started referring to the pro-Trump alternative media as “fake news”, but now Trump has totally turned that insult against them.

For weeks Trump has been referring to CNN as “fake news”, but on Friday he said that he was now going to refer to them as “very fake news”. The following exchange between Trump and CNN’s Jim Acosta comes from the official White House website…

Q Just because of the attack of fake news and attacking our network, I just want to ask you, sir — THE PRESIDENT: I’m changing it from fake news, though. Q Doesn’t that undermine — THE PRESIDENT: Very fake news now. (Laughter.)

We have never seen an exchange quite like that between a president of the United States and a prominent member of the mainstream media, but it was well overdue…

Trump: I'm changing CNN from "fake news" to "very fake news." pic.twitter.com/5ZRoDXdUNz — Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) February 16, 2017

For eight years, the mainstream media gushed and fawned over Barack Obama because he supported the progressive agenda of the global elite, but now that Trump is in the White House virtually every story from the mainstream media is negative.

So when Chief White House Strategist Steve Bannon refers to them as “the opposition party” he is right on target…

In a rare interview with The New York Times last month, Chief White House Strategist Steve Bannon, the former chair of the far-right Breitbart News, called reporters the “opposition party” and said “the media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while.” “They don’t understand this country,” Bannon said. “They still do not understand why Donald Trump is the president of the United States.”

At this point, the mainstream media is so desperate to portray Trump as a bad guy that they have resorted to a modern day version of McCarthyism. For decades, liberals always pointed to McCarthyism as one of the greatest examples of paranoia and intolerance in modern American history, but now they are doing the exact same thing to Trump…

A bizarre feature of the present confrontation is that the Democrats and liberals have relaunched McCarthyism, something they would have decried as a toxic episode in American political history until a few months ago. Just as Senator Joe McCarthy claimed in 1950 to have a list of communist infiltrators in the State Department, so any contact between a Trump supporter or official and a Russian is now being reported as suspicious and potentially treacherous. It is difficult to see where Trump is wrong when he tweeted that “the Democrats had to come up with a story as to why they lost the election, and so badly, so they made up a story – RUSSIA. Fake news!”

The reason why many of us constantly refer to the mainstream media as a single entity is because it really is very tightly controlled. You see, the truth is that more than 90 percent of the news, information and entertainment that Americans get through their televisions comes from just 6 giant media corporations. And of course those 6 enormous corporations are owned and controlled by the elite of the world.

The war for our society is a war for hearts and minds, and the reason why the elite have made so much progress is because most Americans allow thousands upon thousands of hours of “programming” to be constantly pumped into their heads.

The following numbers come directly from Nielsen, and they show how much news, information and entertainment average Americans consume through various methods each day…

Watching live television: 4 hours, 32 minutes

Watching time-shifted television: 30 minutes

Listening to the radio: 2 hours, 44 minutes

Using a smartphone: 1 hour, 33 minutes

Using Internet on a computer: 1 hour, 6 minutes

When you add the top two categories together, the average American consumes more than five hours of television every single day.

And when you add all of those categories together, the average American is plugged into “the matrix” in some way for more than 10 hours a day.

We are literally subjecting ourselves to a form of very powerful mind control, and the extraordinary power of the media is something that I addressed in my novel. There are some people that actually cannot stand complete silence because they have become so accustomed to having something “on” all the time. As a society, we are absolutely addicted to entertainment, but there is always an agenda behind that entertainment. This is something that I talked about in a previous article…

Virtually every television show, movie, song, book, news broadcast and talk show is trying to shape how you view reality. Whether you realize it or not, you are constantly being bombarded with messages about what is true and what is not, about what is right and what is wrong, and about what really matters and what is unimportant. Even leaving something out or ignoring something completely can send an extremely powerful message.

When Donald Trump said that the mainstream media is “the enemy of the American People”, he was 100 percent correct.

If our country is going to have a positive future, the immense power that these media corporations have over the general population must be broken.

It is about time that we had a president that was willing to go to war with the mainstream media, and I greatly applaud President Trump for the stand that he is taking.