Don’t fall for Trump’s and Ford’s attacks on media
By now we should be used to Donald Trump’s outrageous flaying of the news media. But it would be a mistake to shrug it off.
He calls a free press, “the enemy of the people.” He classifies any news he doesn’t like as, “fake news.” He accuses journalists of “causing war” and being “dangerous and sick.” He encourages people at his rallies to scream insults at reporters.
If that doesn’t make our blood boil, we have a problem. The behaviour is so crass and so harmful to democracy, it has to be called out each and every time. We can’t let it slide as just Trump being Trump.
Our country isn’t immune to government leaders characterizing the media as unfair, ignorant, and oppositional. It goes back to John A. Macdonald’s feud with George Brown of the Globe, and has run hot and cold ever since.
Alberta, in 1938, passed a bill forcing newspapers to print the government’s rebuttal to any criticism. The Supreme Court struck it down. John Diefenbaker was so convinced that journalists were biased against him he tried to rally support in his 1963 election campaign behind the slogan, “Everyone is against me — except the people!”
Stephen Harper had a notoriously fractious relationship with the media. Now Ontario’s new premier Doug Ford is taking the first steps down the same road. His government has tried to stage manage news conferences, has started a phoney “Ontario News Now” propa- ganda outlet, and has labelled honest reporting about a broken campaign promise, “fake news.”
A lot of people must think all of this is OK. After all, both Trump and Ford have plenty of support. Maybe these people don’t know history.
After the American Revolution, as the new country was adopting a constitution and considering amendments, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”
Those words are fairly well known. Less remembered are the words Jefferson wrote next. “But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them.”
In other words, it isn’t enough to have a free press. Everyone has to understand the purpose of the press, and be eager to consume it. Put into today’s terms, everyone has to be media literate. Everyone should know how news is gathered, edited, and distributed, and how precious a free press is.
Then they would know that nobody who has called the media an enemy of the people has escaped the stern verdict of history. Robespierre before the French Revolution. Lenin. Stalin. Mao. You would think today’s politicians would try to avoid that company.
Then there’s Henrik Ibsen’s 1882 play, An Enemy of the People. It’s about a doctor who discovers the water in the town’s baths is contaminated. Worried the town will be ruined, the newspaper decides to ignore the doctor’s findings and instead prints the mayor’s assurances that the water is fine. At a townhall meeting the doctor is denounced as, “an enemy of the people.”
The irony, which would be lost on Donald Trump and his ilk, is that the “enemy” is the one telling the truth.
News and information is too important to either blindly accept or reject. If we don’t understand the basic principles of what the media does, perhaps it’s easy to credit a blow-hard president who knows no boundaries of decency.
Totalitarian governments do their foul deeds out of the public spotlight. They tell their citizens what’s true and what isn’t true, and they expect the public to accept their assertions because there are no pesky journalists to say otherwise.
We can’t possibly want that. But unless we stand up against governments who seek to demonize those who question them, we are hastening the day when that’s exactly what we’ll have.
Everyone should know how news is gathered, edited, and distributed, and how precious a free press is.