Is freedom of the press really the issue here?

A “friend’s” Facebook post recently made a plea to “Hug a journalist today! There’s a reason Freedom of the Press is the FIRST Amendment to our Constitution. Stand up for that freedom and don’t let anyone try to take it away from us!”

It was accompanied by a graphic to “Stand for press freedom,” an obvious hint that somehow recently — after Jan. 20 I’m guessing — the media in this country is being persecuted or censored and fears losing its First Amendment rights.

Seems like the press has all the freedom it could desire. We say and write just about what we want.

Some of it is true, some not. Some of it has sources happy to go “on the record” while others are “not verified.” Or they speak on condition of anonymity because they are “not officially authorized to comment.”

Ask yourself, as I do, is it really that the press is being threatened by President Donald Trump? Or, for the first time in, well, forever, is there a president who openly — and regularly — challenges the media in how we are supposed to do the age-old business with which we are entrusted as “watch dogs,” of the government.

Mind you, in the past 16 years this is the same media that made George W. Bush out to be dumb as a post and Barack Obama to be the second coming of Jesus Christ.

What the media seems to be most offended by is that Trump is able to bypass the press, 140 characters at a time. He tells a side of the story that is always unfiltered and indeed sometimes not truthful. That impetuousness certainly cuts both ways as we all know.

Naturally, the posts elicited a lively “discussion” from numerous corners, and all kinds of political stripes.

One of my favorites was, “I remember when ‘60 Minutes’ purposely sabotaged the Ford Pinto to show that it exploded when hit from behind.”

Fearful of being accused of being a purveyor of “fake news,” and wanting to make sure hazy memories are correct, some research revealed that recollection was not “60 Minutes,” outing the Pinto, but instead needing 435 tries to get eight rollovers and hoping to get the public to think the vehicle was unsafe.

But it was the perfect way to illustrate the point that some in the media have issues from time to time when trusted with telling the truth.

In actuality it was ABC’s “20/20” that made the exploding Pinto claim, but it was all from film and a scenario constructed by UCLA researchers in the late 1960s, designed simply to show the effects of a fire in an automobile’s passenger compartment. It produced the perfect story to fit ABC’s agenda that the Pinto was a bomb on wheels. But in reality the same tests were done on other Ford models, too.

Not to be outdone, in the early 1990s, NBC admitted it had used incendiary devices in staging a fiery test crash of a General Motors pickup truck for its “Dateline NBC” news program. The network lost a defamation suit.

It’s darned ironic that the iconic former news anchor, Dan Rather, took to Facebook last weekend and called Trump’s recent attacks on the press a “deep betrayal of our national history.” Hmmm, funny how Rather has any credibility left after losing his career fabricating a story on the military service of former president George W. Bush.

If the press is being fair to everyone who occupies 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. — and that seems to be a critical issue in this latest war of words — can someone point me to the video where reporters are questioning President Obama and asking him to explain his promise that the Affordable Care Act would save me $2,500 on insurance premiums?

Or better yet, I would love to ask him why, for the first time in my working life, I pay a healthy chunk of my health insurance premium? Chirp, chirp, chirp go the crickets.

Instead of crying foul over a president that calls them to task, perhaps the media needs to do as CBS’s “Face the Nation” host, John Dickerson, did while interviewing pundit Hugh Hewitt on his Feb. 17 radio show.

Be brutally honest in assessing the situation.

‘“They don’t trust you anymore,’ is a summation of where we are in America, because I really do think Manhattan-Beltway elites have lost the country,” Hewitt said.

Dickerson responded, “Yes, it’s true, and it’s not because of anything obviously Donald Trump did. The press did all that good work ruining its reputation on its own and we can have a long conversation about what created that.”

Paul Delaney can be reached at pdelaney@cheneyfreepress.com.