A nation must think before it acts.
FPRI Senior Fellow Mitchell Orenstein Interviewed by Snopes
Mitchell Orenstein, senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and professor of Russian and Eastern European Studies at University of Pennsylvania, told us it was no accident that the Russian government officials came to visit and reporters started getting treated harshly:
I think the issue is that they excluded the American press and included only TASS, which sent a very strong message to the press and people in general that only press agencies that are lapdogs to the government are going to get near the president. …
It wasn’t any coincidence that the Russians came to town and people are treating the press worse. A lot of people believe that Trump is Putin’s puppet and he is, and essentially he is taking cues from Putin. He’s learning about how to control the press, how to intimidate the press, how to behave with impunity. This is all the school of dictatorship and he’s a student.