It’s all about power
Donald Trump has taken his attacks on the news media to a new level, yanking the White House press credentials of a CNN reporter he doesn’t like, threatening to punish others and labelling individual journalists as “enemies of the people.”
A lot more is at stake in this than the professional privileges or personal feelings of the people who work in the media. Trump’s broadsides against so-called “fake news” are a blow at the foundations of democracy at home and give dictators abroad implicit permission to crack down on free speech in their backyards.
It’s especially heartening, then, to hear a robust defence of the crucial role of a free media coming not from journalists themselves or their allies in civil society, but from a leading politician himself.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau spoke out eloquently this past weekend at a meeting hosted by the press freedom group Reporters Without Borders. He made it clear that attacks on the media by the likes of Trump (whose name he didn’t mention) are really about power — getting it and holding it. It’s worth quoting his remarks at length:
“The powerful throughout history have always tried to silence those who would challenge them ... There’s always been tension between those who would speak truth to power and those who like having their power. But we are now in a phase where that capacity to speak truth to power, that very capacity for a citizen to engage with truth, is under attack.
“Attacks on the media are not just about getting your preferred political candidate elected; they are about increasing the level of cynicism that citizens have toward all authorities, towards all of the institutions that are there to protect us as citizens. And when you combine that with the very real anxiety that so many citizens are feeling ... there are lots of levers one can tug on to exacerbate that anxiety, to undermine our trust in institutions and increase our cynicism.
“One of the bulwarks against that, and one of the institutions that is most under stress right now, is a freethinking, independent, rigorous, robust, respected media. If a democracy is to function, you need to have an educated populace, and you need to have an informed populace, ready to make judicious decisions about who to grant power to and when to take it away.
“When citizens cannot have rigorous analysis of the exercise of the power that is in their name and they have granted, the rest of the foundation of our democracies starts to erode at the same time as cynicism arises. When people feel their institutions can’t protect them, they look for easy answers in populism, in nationalism, in closing borders, in shutting down trade, in xenophobia.”
We could hardly have put it better ourselves.
It’s especially heartening to hear a robust defence of a free media coming from a leading politician