“Trump’s war with the ‘liberal’ press.”
Are there any innnocents in this fight?
To our readers. We apologize for our silence lately. No sooner did we return from our summer lectures in Switzerland (published here and here) than we succumbed to bouts of Covid. We’re now coming back to life, per usual gradually.
—P. L. and C. M.
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1 OCTOBER—If the Trump regime is any good at anything, it is escalation. Wars, sanctions, tariffs, portentous threats of ever more of these, and we cannot omit the genocidal terror the president supports in behalf of Israel and his Zionist benefactors: Donald J. Trump is always good to take matters recklessly on in the wrong direction.
We come to the Trumpster’s attacks on the liberal press and broadcasters. The Trump regime has conducted an across-the-board assault on these media, U.S. and foreign alike, since he returned to office last year. He has just escalated this campaign big time, announcing two weeks ago that CNN, MSNOW, and Politico would no longer be allowed entry into the White House.
Here is Trump two Fridays back on Truth Social, his digital bullhorn. I quote courtesy of The Case Western Reserve Observer:
I am proud to announce that, effective immediately, I am banning Fake News CNN, MSNOW… and Politico … from the White House as a result of their constant “reporting” FAKE NEWS. Media Outlets shouldn’t be able to constantly write or report FICTION and LIES when they’re covering the President of the United States, the Trump Administration or the United States of America. Other Fake News Media Outlets to follow.
If Trump’s war against media is as old as his presidency—if it does not, indeed, predate his arrival at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue—with this audacious move he opens a new front. You, correspondent McGillicudy, cannot come onto the White House grounds? This is purposefully provocative, if you ask me—a confrontation for the sake of confrontation.
There are some grave matters at issue here. One is the First Amendment, another is the constitutionally protected freedom of the press, and a third—not to be missed in all this—is the sequestration of power in our late-phase imperium. Trump is an obvious threat to the first two of these, and his regime—I have in mind Pete Hegseth’s restrictions on access to the Pentagon—is plainly dedicated to operating as much in secret as the courts will allow.
Let us take all due care to understand what is and is not at issue here. This public combat is not as simple as it may appear to some.
There is no standing with Trump on this one: There never is as his solipsism tips into insanity. He and his adjutants—Hegseth et al.—are to be countered by all available means. This is to state the obvious. But to be perfectly clear straightaway, there is no standing with those Trump singled out and the media allied with them, either. Critical support, very critical, is the best one can offer.
“There’s something wrong with a country that can allow people to write purposely negative stories,” our rotund leader said to reporters after announcing his ban. There is, arguably, but they have a right to write and publish them in our nominally free republic. There is something very wrong, nothing to argue about, when liberal-authoritarian media are the front line in an urgently needed defense of the First Amendment and the long-running fight to counter secrecy in government with transparency.
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The banished news organizations sued immediately after Trump announced his ban, as he had to know they would. The five television networks responsible for pooling live coverage of the White House—one network supplies and shares footage daily on a rotating basis—simply stopped covering the media-greedy president in solidarity with CNN. This, a twist of the knife, left Trump’s gaudily managed summit with Xi Jinping untelevised.
A federal judge ruled last week in favor of the banned organizations by way of a temporary restraining order, but the White House instantly defied it. When it was next CNN’s turn to pool, it barred the network from Air Force One as Trump traveled to Knoxville to watch a University of Tennessee–University of Texas football game. It did the same again today, when it was again CNN’s turn to pool.
After a brief boycott the four unbanned networks—ABC, CBS, Fox News, and NBC—have resumed pooling broadcast coverage while leaving the White House uncovered when it is CNN’s turn. So it was today, as Trump traveled to Texas and Oklahoma in behalf of two pols campaigning in advance of the midterm elections. There was no pooled network footage of the occasion.
Judge Timothy Kelly’s restraining order is in force for 14 days from Sept. 24 and, so, will expire on 8 October. At writing, the networks are awaiting his ruling on their request to extend it. But there is already a fourth issue here: To Trump’s abuses of the First Amendment and freedom of the press we must add another—his serial challenges to the authority of the judiciary.
Let us stay tuned, as they say.
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As all this has unfolded my thoughts have drifted back to a piece Jim Rutenberg, The New York Times’s media correspondent, published in August 2016, just as Trump arrived in national politics and the liberal authoritarians in our midst were beginning their long-running freakout. Here is Rutenberg’s lead under the headline, “Trump Is Testing the Norms of Objectivity in Journalism”:
If you’re a working journalist and you believe that Donald J. Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalistic tendencies, that he cozies up to anti–American dictators and that he would be dangerous with control of the United States nuclear codes, how the heck are you supposed to cover him?
Because if you believe all of those things, you have to throw out the textbook American journalism has been using for the better part of the past half-century, if not longer, and approach it in a way you’ve never approached anything in your career. If you view a Trump presidency as something that’s potentially dangerous, then your reporting is going to reflect that. You would move closer than you’ve ever been to being oppositional. That’s uncomfortable and uncharted territory for every mainstream, non-opinion journalist I’ve ever known, and by normal standards, untenable.
As readers may recall, there was all sorts of pseudo-thoughtful baloney going around at this time, to the effect that the principle of objectivity must be replaced by “moral clarity,” that flimsy phrase liberals took up because it sounded better than “ideological allegiance.”
I simply could not believe how stupid practitioners of Rutenberg’s generation were as they indulged their political and cultural prejudices. How could they miss the old adage, What goes around will come around? What were they betraying if not a fatal loss of faith in the journalist’s place in the polity and a dereliction of his or her responsibilities—altogether a failure to understand journalism as an independent pole of power?
Jim Rutenberg and all the apostles of “moral clarity” have kept their word: You have to give them this. Their coverage of Trump I, the four-year interim that followed, and now Trump II has been transparently loaded against this president, and Trump’s manifest egregiousness these past 10 years is no excuse for it.
Two examples. One, simply stated, is the Russiagate fiasco. We still live with the damage this gross irresponsibility has done, not least geopolitically. Two, there is the shameful coverup of the Biden family’s corruption before and during Joe Biden’s presidency. Here I will note the concerted effort to discredit the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop three weeks before the 2024 election and media’s participation in the so-called weaponization of the Justice Department during Biden’s term in office.
Now we know what they meant by “moral clarity.” The bitter, very bitter truth these people cannot face is that Donald Trump has a clear case when he carries on in all caps about “FAKE NEWS.”
Trump is not the first, we must note, to play the access card when dealing with the White House press corps. One administration after another going back who knows how long had their innings in this game; the Bush II, Obama and Biden regimes, to keep the point to our century, certainly did.
At the horizon we are looking at a dysfunction that transcends the contest for power between liberal authoritarians—politely called “centrists” these days—and their rightist counterparts. Mainstream American media long ago surrendered their sovereignty as that independent pole of power I mentioned just above. They serve the late-phase imperium. Next to this reality, what we witness now takes on the character of bickering in the upper reaches of power.
The reigning Russophobia, the ever-mounting Sinophobia, the Islamic Republic as a dangerous rogue state, the erasure of history and causality in the reporting of the Ukraine war, what amounts to a massive coverup of the Zionist regime’s crimes in Gaza, the West Bank, and elsewhere in West Asia: None of this changes as the guard changes from Tweedledee to Tweedledum in Washington.
The First Amendment—certainly this—but also the sequestration of power and the place and role of the press in the American polity: All of these questions warrant urgent address. This should now be plain. But there is no grounds to leave these tasks to mainstream newspapers, magazines, digital publications and broadcasters, however they love to mount their horses in a cause they long ago abandoned.
It is somewhat in the way of Trump’s confrontation with the leadership of the Smithsonian Institution (a topic on which I plan a full-length essay). Trump’s attempt to take possession of the American past requires a vigorous defense, but I do not trust the wokified ideologues running the National Museum of American History to mount it. It is one mutilation of history versus another.
I take a bitter reminder from these various confrontations between “liberals” and our serially destructive president. There is no restoring all the institutions that have crumbled since the events of 11 September 2001, my date for the beginning of the imperium’s demise. We must look to build anew if we are to escape the eternal present that confines us and build a different future.
Case in point. You are reading an independent publication. It is in media such as this where lies any prospect of solutions to the crises Trump has precipitated with the press and broadcasters.
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This is an updated and expanded version of a piece that originally appeared in Consortium News.
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