Beat The Press

The news media have expressed shock that Donald Trump has repeatedly made attacks on the news media, as a part of his road show. His contempt for the reporters who follow him everywhere and broadcast every word has been expressed thus: “I hate them. I wouldn’t kill them (here he mimes considering the idea), but I hate them.” And so should you, is implied. And so they do.

This is comic because his campaign has spent virtually nothing on advertising, so-called paid media, because he has gotten 24/7 free media, i.e. news coverage. It could be argued that without fights with Fox News people, calls to Morning Joe and sit downs with every anchor on the planet he’d be down at the Dubuque Barnes and Noble with Dr. Carson flogging his book.

His latest fun with the media has been to demand that their cameramen play Leni Riefenstahl to his Fuhrer, swiveling the cameras from his face to give a panoramic shot of his adoring crowds to document their size and fervor. Scratch a ham actor and you discover a wannabe director.

Some delicate news types with short memories have bemoaned Trump’s attacks on a free press and the First Amendment as a new low, but of course this sort of thing has a long pedigree. A certain sort of crowd is always pleased by attacks on the news media, since it bring unwelcome news and notices when the emperor has no clothes. Anytime the facts collide with their beliefs, they call the media biased.

Populist demagogues are especially fond of seeking to discredit any reporting not favorable to them. Sarah Palin made a mini-career out of attacking the Lame Stream Media. It is a standard trope of talk radio. Fox News paints itself as the antidote to biased media. George Wallace elicited cries of joy from his crowds whenever he attacked reporters along with pointy-headed intellectuals.

George W. Bush, scion of generations of patrician Yale men, pointed out to Dick Cheney the New York Times reporter covering their race and called him, “a major-league asshole.” Since his mic was on, the nation was allowed to eavesdrop on this elevated presidential sentiment. But of course his party was delighted at the anti-press rhetoric.

Ike in 1964 called on Republicans at the Goldwater nominating convention to “scorn the divisive efforts of…sensation-seeking columnists and commentators” because they “couldn’t care less about the good of our party.” Of course, that isn’t in their job description, but such sentiments are red meat to a partisan crowd.

In the early years of this country, the press was as partisan as the politicians, indeed the papers were founded to promote one party or the other. From CQ Researcher come these lovely quoted to illustrate how in the early Republic’s frankly partisan Federalist and Anti-Fed Papers had no interest in fair minded, objective reporting. The Anti-Fed rag said Washington was “the man who is the source of all the misfortune of our country” and described John Adams “as a monarchist, a lover of titles, and an enemy of liberty.” For its part, the Federalist version denounced Jefferson as “an atheist, a coward in the Revolution, a tool of France, and an enemy of the Constitution.”

In the early years of the 20th Century newspapers began to shed the party banner and to embrace an ethos of objective reporting as a civic duty. It also served the goal of the papers to get readers of all sorts to subscribe since more eyes meant more advertising dollars. But in the last forty years, a number of forces have contrived to make the landscape of politics and journalism increasingly partisan.

Under Nixon journalists were put on an enemies list and the Vice President was sent forth to attack them as “nattering nabobs of negativism.” Campaigning was increasingly conducted via advertising, not through press appearances. The validity of the Nixonian critique of the hostile press was undercut somewhat when Agnew pleaded nolo to tax evasion and the taking of bribes and Nixon had to resign his office in the face of articles of impeachment. But diehard Republicans continued to assert any villainy belonged to the press not to the criminal office holders

The Reagan presidency avoided the media in Hollywood style, by stage managing every appearance and minimizing any unscripted contact with those trying to cover him. By 1992, however, the never fully hidden animosity to the press was on full display at the Republican National Convention. That year Pat Buchanan, ironically a creature of the media himself, ran against George H.W. Bush, a sitting president of his own party, on an isolationist, nativist, anti-immigrant, “true conservative” platform. Sound familiar? And attacks on the press were a part of his shtick.

I was present at the Houston convention where Buchanan delivered his angry culture wars call to arms, and the mood of the delegates was toxic. He sneered at “columnists and commentators, looking down on us tonight from their anchor booths and sky boxes” who still hadn’t joined in the adoration of Reagan.

I was a media small fry, but many of the old hands present were frankly amazed at the level of vitriol directed at members of the press. The Bush campaign treated them with contempt with the exception of those anchors in their skyboxes. But delegates accosted workaday reporters in the halls of the Astrodome. Jack Germond, a legendary political reporter, was told by a furious Republican, “I see you on TV and I hate you. You can’t be a Christian and be a Democrat.” Other reporters, including some women, were shoved, manhandled and spat upon.

Those days and the shock at such treatment now seem quaint. Attacking the press was once, if nothing else, considered tactically ill-advised. It used to be said that you shouldn’t pick a fight with a man who buys ink by the barrel. But no one uses ink anymore. Newspapers are yesterday’s news and so are trusted news anchors. The ideal of objective reporting and a wall between news and editorial comment is vanishing.

In the internet era, everyman is his own publisher, and if you don’t like the Lame Stream media, you’ve got Fox and Rush and Drudge to bring you news baked to your taste. Now candidates blog and tweet their own spin on the day’s events as fast as it happens. And forthrightly express their hatred of the media and their dream of killing them. For laughs only, of course.

We are returning to the kind of environment that existed from the Revolution to the Gilded Age. Then newspapers spoke for a party, not for the people. The change from that to a journalism at least trying to get to the facts of the matter seemed like progress. This seems like regress. Furnishing the electorate with the information needed to make informed choices was once considered a noble, or at least a useful calling, even essential to democracy.

Making the media a target, a talking point, an entry on an enemies list, treating the news as a divisive exercise instead of a search for common ground contributes to the fracturing of the nation that both parties bemoan.

Thomas Jefferson, who many of the press haters claim as a hero, was rather plain on this issue. “Our liberty cannot be guarded but by the freedom of the press.” But maybe those who snipe at the press have good reason to hate it, if Jefferson was right. He said, Our citizens may be deceived for awhile, and have been deceived; but as long as the presses can be protected, we may trust to them for light.”

If he were living at this hour, would he be pleased with the press he sees, or with the respect accorded it by the citizenry? Or would be say, as he once did on another subject, “I tremble for my country?”

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