Journalist Carl Bernstein on Sunday condemned President Donald Trump's attacks on the media as indications of "terrible authoritarian tendencies."
In remarks on CNN's "Reliable Sources," the Pulitzer Prize winning Watergate reporter decried the president's media barbs as "more treacherous than Richard Nixon's" attacks that were "largely in private."
Bernstein said the press is "doing our job."
"That is what we are there to do," he said. "We need to find out all of what this president is doing, what his administration is doing. Nothing more, nothing less. That's what we're doing. We are not enemies of the American people. In fact, we're the last resort of the American people to a dictatorial and authoritarian inclined president."
Bernstein charged "there's a history" of dictators charging the press is an "enemy of the people."
"We are into terrible authoritarian tendencies that we are seeing in the president of the United States we've never seen in an American president" with "such open authoritarian moves and rhetoric," he said.
"When the press was reporting on Hillary Clinton's [email] server and the Clinton Foundation, the same people who he is now calling enemies of the American people, Donald Trump thought we were patriots."