Enemies of the People

I have covered this subject before, but among the many areas where Trump’s actions are causing long-lasting damage to the country I believe that his denigration and undermining of mainstream media is the most insidious. This is not to minimize the racism that props up many of his policies, or the incompetence with which he oversees the executive branch, his empowerment of white supremacists and Christian nationalists, his authoritarian tendencies or the way one-way loyalty to him is a proxy for actual qualifications. All of those things are incredibly damaging, but despite the fact that the press sometimes gets it wrong, a free press has always been an effective way to hold our elected officials accountable.

News coverage of government can be broadly divided into two categories: opinion and news. Opinion includes editorials, which are the institutional position of a news outlet, analysis, which is when the meaning of government actions is speculated upon, and columnists, who generally have a bias or point of view that colors their coverage of events. News, on the other hand, when done right, is simply reporting on what happened. A news story might report that the president said xyz, and the Speaker of the House responded abc and certain polls had such-and-such percentage approval. An opinion piece might contain musings about whether xyz was a good idea or what the results of that policy might be, or whether response abc was warranted or what the polls indicated about the president’s reelection prospects. Most mainstream news organizations, including those that we might think display a partisan bias in their opinion pieces; employ people who take great pride in getting their facts right and have a system in place to verify their own reporting. Do they sometimes get it wrong? Yes, but getting a story factually wrong is an embarrassment that is to be avoided at all costs.

Around the middle of 2016, we began to hear the term “fake news”. At first, this referred to articles and websites that were created solely for the purpose of spreading disinformation. Often they would imitate the look of an existing news organization or have a similar web address. This was one of the main weapons in the arsenal of Russian intelligence’s efforts to influence our election. It worked to the extent that many people, who had no inclination to fact-check anything that supported their preconceived notions, believed what they read on these fake news sites. Another phenomenon that had been growing for years was the proliferation of blogs. For the most part bloggers were the independent version of a newspaper’s opinion page. Most blogs made no secret of their own point of view and mainly expressed their opinion of what was going on in government and politics. (I include myself in this – even though I take great effort to be factually accurate, this blog is my opinion, and I seldom cite sources). Despite bloggers being the online version of the know-it-all at the end of the bar, or your drunk uncle at Thanksgiving, well-publicized blogs became a news sources for many people.

Wading into this confusing mess was Donald Trump, then a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. He took the term “fake news” and applied it to any news story that he did not like, mainly for portraying him in an unflattering light. Trump and his supporters will refer to various studies that show that a large majority (they usually quote a percentage in the nineties) of news stories about Trump are “negative”, concluding that this is proof that the mainstream media is out to get him. However, studies by nonpartisan groups such as Pew Research calculate around 90% of stories that display a positive or negative slant and that around a third are neutral. Still, the supposedly negative coverage is overwhelming. It is instructive to note what counts as “negative”. If CNN reports that Trump is documented to have lied 3,000 times in a certain period, is that negative? The methodology would categorize it as such, but if he actually did lie that many times, then it is simply reporting the news, albeit news that reflects negatively on Trump. Consider that through most of Trump’s presidency he has been in the midst of either an investigation or an impeachment. Any mention of those two things would tick the “negative” box, but they are just facts.

Since Trump continues to do things that reflect negatively on him, this trend will continue, drowning out any positive news, like low unemployment.

Trump’s continual attacks on the free press have, for most of his supporters, undermined any credibility that formerly respected news organizations had. An independent voice, a check on corruption in government, a bright light on misdeeds, is disbelieved without any evidence simply because one man says so. Even more dangerous is the characterization of the majority of news organizations, not merely as fake news, something that can be ignored, but as “the enemy of the people”. At times Trump has attempted to finesse this by saying that it’s only “fake news” that is the people’s enemy, as if he believes there is a “real news” out there somewhere that he won’t turn on when they displease him (I’m looking at you, Fox News). Virtually every major news organization has been tarred by Trump as “the enemy of the people”. When you take this to its logical conclusion, what do governments do with their enemies? Do they let them continue to behave traitorously? (Another word Trump has thrown around) Or do they take action to somehow stop them?

As Trump stacks the courts with allies, and eliminates those who are not loyal from the Justice Department, and continues to flout the law with impunity, what means are left to stop him from rendering the First Amendment effectively null and void?