IN A WORLD OF LIES, NOTHING IS MORE PRECIOUS THAN THE TRUTH
We need reporters to challenge liars big and small, writes
If there is one standard journalists must fight to protect, it is the banner that proclaims what is true. This would seem obvious, but considering the assaults being made on truth today, there is more need now than ever before to separate what is true from what is a lie.
U.S. President Donald Trump has taken lying to a new level. He lies knowingly, unhesitatingly, gratuitously and deliberately.
He calls those journalists who expose his lies “the enemies of the people,” a frightening phrase that has been used to justify state violence against opposition minorities in ancient Rome, the French Revolution, Stalinist Russia and countless other countries governed by despotic regimes.
That Trump resorts to such a phrase should be considered a badge of honour by those American journalists who take issue with mendacity, but for the fact that it also carries an implicit threat of violence.
In his column headlined “Trump and the Enemies of the People,” The New Yorker’s David Remnick writes that Nikita Khrushchev, in his memoirs, observed his predecessor Josef Stalin referred to “everyone who didn’t agree with him as an ‘enemy of the people.’ ”
On the importance of fighting against the assault on the press, Remnick writes: “This is not a matter of the press seeking to protect itself as an interest group. The interest group in question is the United States.”
We may not agree with journalists, nor with all of their journalism, but with functioning democracies dependent on an informed electorate, we ignore legitimate journalists at our peril and even, at democracy’s peril.
And what of those thinly veiled threats against U.S. journalists from the highest office in that land? They are seen by many as cowardice and collusion by one of the world’s great democracies in the effort to silence free speech. The Committee to Protect Journalists records and publicizes the grim statistics of ongoing violence against journalists.
Just this month, Jamal Khashoggi, a critic of the Saudi Arabian regime and a global opinion columnist with the Washington Post, walked into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul and was never seen again. On the very day that officials in Turkey reported Khashoggi had been murdered inside that consulate, Trump reiterated that billions of dollars in Saudi investment precluded any U.S. sanctions.
Around the same time, Committee to Protect Journalists board chair Kathleen Carroll spoke out in a tweet: “In the last 15 days: Turkey accuses Saudi Arabia of murdering journalist #JamalKhashoggi. Bulgarian journalist #VictoriaMarinova is killed. Reporter #Ab dir isak Said Os man knifed to death in Somalia. Reporter #MarioLeonelGomezSanchez gunned down in Chiapas. Dear God.”
As a dissident, Khashoggi had left his home in Saudi Arabia when he was banned from reporting and writing. “I have left my home, my family and my job, and I am raising my voice,” he wrote. “To do otherwise would betray those who languish in prison. I can speak when so many cannot.”
There have been other journalists killed this year amid suspicions their deaths were ordered by governments or powerful interests associated with corrupt politicians.
Even the idyllic Mediterranean island of Malta numbers among them.
Trump, as the president of the most powerful country on Earth, could be a powerful advocate of democratic freedom. Instead, his lies strike at the very foundation of democracy. Ridiculous as some of them are, they are still dangerous, in the first instance because they are aimed at deceiving or confusing the electorate and, in the second instance, because others in government, big business or big institutions — any entity that has relations with the public — might be encouraged to follow his example.
All that stands between an unsuspecting public and big government, big corporations, big agencies and all of their self-serving agendas, is the thin red line of journalists. Informed journalism is the last defence against those powerful entities that cannot always be trusted to tell it like it is.
There is no other effective mechanism in a democracy that can be trusted to ferret out the truth than an independent media employing professional journalists. They are trained to seek the truth, to expose lies.
Dealing in false information is anathema to journalism, and the penalty is usually discipline or even dismissal.
Newspapers were the first foundation of journalism, then the craft spread to radio, TV, and now the internet.
The proliferation was positive because it put more eyes on the workings of governments, corporations and agencies. However, the internet has also fuelled the spread of misinformation, whether it’s Russia influencing elections or Trump tweeting.
Apart from reporting what is in the open, often the more important work we do is finding out what is hidden. The examples are many, but Watergate and the fall of the Nixon administration remains the benchmark.
The future, though, is clouded. News organizations have been savaged by the loss of advertising caused by the emergence of the internet and public demands that journalists offer their work free of charge.
Newsrooms everywhere have shrunk in size, making it difficult to gauge how journalism will look 10 years from now.
All we can say with certainty is that the future of democracy depends on having a functioning, healthy media with reporters ready to challenge liars big and small.