This isn’t much of a surprise since the press is supposed to serve a watchdog function. Being a pain to the president is essentially the business.

Yet it seems to me, Mickey, that there are important differences between what we are seeing with Trump compared to what we have seen with other presidents in years gone by. The most relevant distinction is the way that Trump has opened up an all-out assault on the news media as an institution from the very start of his presidency. Rather than complaining about how the press treats him or highlighting particular stories that he disagrees with, Trump literally declared war on the media in the first hours of his campaign and has continued to unleash a relentless assault on what he calls “fake news.” It’s a centerpiece of his first hundred days. He makes no distinctions between different parts of the media, simply blasting the entire institution as illegitimate and irrelevant.

The attacks are troubling given that this is a president who is willing to constantly traffic in falsehood. From the moment of his inauguration, Trump has made statements and claims that are not true. He has insisted that he would have won the popular vote, had it not been for massive voting fraud, and that he won the largest Electoral College victory since Reagan. He has made claims about terrorist attacks that never happened, as have his closest advisers, and offered falsehoods about murder rates, the economy, crowd sizes, and more. Through what Kellyanne Conway called “alternative facts,” Trump has been creating his own alternative narrative about world events that actually competes with the fact-based reporting coming from the press. This, too, is a way that he assaults the media, and some of his claims—like voter fraud—have actually gained traction despite the absence of evidence. With a president willing to make such statements in a way that we have not seen before, the standing of the press becomes weaker.

Trump has also gone to war with particular reporters and particular news outlets, like CNN, in a manner that other presidents have avoided. Through his tweets and during his press conferences we have seen him cajole and bully specific reporters, treating them as “enemies of the people.” There were moments during his campaign when reporters were scared for their physical safety. This kind of brutal and explicit intimidation, with the power that comes with the office of the presidency, can have a chilling effect. There were reports that Jared Kushner told Time Warner about his concerns of CNN’s coverage of the White House, as AT&T’s $85.4 billion acquisition of the company still must be approved by the Justice Department and FCC.

The final difference has to do with the nature of the news media in 2017. Technological changes have reduced the number of editorial and production barriers that exist toward the dissemination of information. The internet has allowed for the democratization of news production in way that allow for fabricated information to reach massive audiences, instantly, and in the guise of legitimate information. It is difficult to tell the difference between truth and fiction. While this has always been a problem, never has technology allowed producers of falsehood to disseminate their hoaxes with such ease and rapidity. This combines with a media environment where partisan news organizations have developed massive infrastructures through which to produce biased reporting in polished and sophisticated fashion. With a president who traffics in this kind of information himself, the checks and balances against him have greatly weakened.