We’re journalists, not the enemy

IF ONLY US President Donald Trump denounced neo-Nazis as passionately and sincerely as he castigates journalists.

For all its failings, journalism remains an indispensable constraint on power. Trump has systematically tried to delegitimise the institutions that hold him accountable – courts, prosecutors, investigators, the media – and that’s the context for his vilification of all them, for we collectively provide monitoring that outrages him.

The New York Times and the Washington Post have separately tallied Trump’s lies, with the Post calculating that he has now made more than 1,000 misleading statements since assuming the presidency. That’s a gruelling pace of almost five a day, and it is accelerating (at the six-month mark, it was 4.6 a day). This prevarication proliferation is an indication that John Kelly is unable to rein in Trump, and that the problem was not Steve Bannon but the president himself.

Trump’s caricature of journalists as dishonest is hypocritical, and it insults the courage and professionalism of my colleagues who sometimes risk their lives trying to get a story.

I’ve lost reporter and photographer friends in war zones all over the world, and have had other friends kidnapped and tortured. When Trump galvanises crowds against reporters in the room, I worry that we may lose journalists in the line of duty not only in places like Syria but also right here in the US.

I also worry that Trump is buoying the repressive instincts of dictators around the world. Since Trump’s election, I’ve been denied entry by Venezuela, Congo, South Sudan and Yemen, an unusual number of countries – and I wonder if foreign leaders believe that it is now easier to deny access to troublesome American journalists now that they are reviled by their own president.

Aside from Trump’s desire to reduce scrutiny and accountability, there are other theories for why Trump finds it so difficult to denounce Nazis and other racists without getting diverted into rants about journalists.

One is that he has always had a soft spot for racists, ever since as a young real estate developer he was sued for systematically discriminating against blacks.

Another theory (these are not mutually exclusive) is that Trump is simply a thin-skinned narcissist who shares the white supremacists’ sense of victimisation. It was striking that in Tuesday’s speech in Phoenix, he seemed to believe that the biggest victim in Charlottesville was not Heather Heyer, who was murdered, but himself.

Yet another possibility, which previously was mostly whispered but is increasingly openly discussed, is that our president is mentally unstable.

The causes of Trump’s bizarre behaviour may be difficult to disentangle. But I hope that you, as members of the public, will understand what is at stake in his assault on the media. This is not about reporters and the mistakes we make, but about institutional checks on the presidency.

The irony has been that the more Trump vilifies the media, the more the public has rallied around us.

This is an extraordinary moment in the history of the US, for we are enduring an epic struggle over the principles on which the country was founded. These include the idea that a flawed free press is an essential institutional check on flawed leaders.

So may I humbly suggest that when a leader howls and shrieks at critics, that is when institutional checks on that leader become a bulwark of democracy.