Good news for journalism
President Trump has reinvigorated journalists and interest in their work
Aday after it was reported that Bloomberg was joining Vanity Fair and The New Yorker in an apparent protest of the president by refusing to host a party on the night of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, mainstream media got some good news: Donald Trump announced he would not attend.
Hardly surprising. The chief purveyor of fake news does not like crowds in which the majority disapprove of him. He dreads being booed, which probably explains why he also bailed on the traditional first pitch on opening day for the Washington Nationals last Monday before a big, unpredictable crowd. (Sad!)
But here’s why Donald Trump’s absence from the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on April 29 is good news for the mainstream media. Over the last 30 years, the annual gathering has transformed from an entertaining celebration of serious journalism into a red carpet affair mixing media and those they cover — show biz stars and political and lobbying poohbahs — in an incestuous bacchanal that’s televised in its entirety. Maybe now the White House Correspondents’ Association can turn this back into a celebration of freedom of the press, honesty and fearlessness even as they share an evening of bonhomie with the people they cover.
This newspaper actually had a tiny role in the transformation of the dinner into a celebrity event, when the late Michael Kelly, then a Washington correspondent for The Sun, brought as his guest in 1987 Fawn Hall, the attention-grabbing secretary to Lt. Col. Oliver North (she helped him destroy evidence in the Iran-Contra affair). In 1988, Mr. Kelly doubled down, bringing as his date Donna Rice, a former South Carolina beauty queen whose affair with Colorado Democratic Sen. Gary Hart had ended Mr. Hart’s front-runner campaign for his party’s presidential nomination.
Michael Kelly had one heck of a sense of humor. But he also was one heck of a journalist who went on to become a writer and editor for The New York Times, The Washington Post and several magazines, including The Atlantic, which now awards a journalism prize named for Mr. Kelly, who was killed in 2003 while covering the Iraq War. This year’s winner of that prize will be announced today in New York..
April is a big month for prizes honoring serious, courageous journalism. The Pulitzer Prizes are to be announced tomorrow. Friday, the annual George Polk Awards were presented to journalists in 14 categories.
The Polk winners, who often also turn out to be Pulitzer winners, included journalists who helped to expose Donald Trump’s vilest behavior (David Fahrenthold of The Washington Post for reporting that included the existence of videotape in which Mr. Trump boasted his celebrity enabled him to get away with making the lewdest advances on women), and how Mr. Trump managed to win anyway (Alec MacGillis of ProPublica — formerly of The Sun — for reporting on the source of Mr. Trump’s popular support including a post-election analysis titled “Revenge of the Forgotten Class”).
The George Polk story offers a chilling example of the worst that can happen when a journalist or journalists are viewed as the enemy of a government. George Polk, who was my cousin, was murdered in a case whose full truth remains uncertain to his day, almost 70 years after the event.
Covering the Greek civil war in 1948, Polk’s reporting for CBS radio and his writing at the time was critical of the Greek government supported by the Truman administration against a communist-dominated insurgency in the opening conflict of the Cold War. Some feared he knew enough to put an end to the U.S. support. In May of 1948 he went to Salonika in northern Greece hoping to interview the leader of the insurgency. His body, bound with rope, with a bullet in the head, was dragged out of Salonika Bay on May 16.
The Greek government blamed the communists and convicted a Salonika journalist, Gregory Staktopoulos, on the basis of a confession obtained by torture, an arrangement accepted by Washington in an appalling cover-up. A dozen years later, Mr. Staktopoulos was released from prison where he was serving a life sentence, with the acknowledgment he had been improperly convicted.
That story is worth keeping in mind the next time you hear Donald Trump or one of his sinister minions denounce the media as the enemy of the American people. Journalism can be dangerous work, as we know from the experiences of journalists working in countries where Trump-supported despots are in power, such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin, or his recent visitor from Egypt, President-by-military-coup Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.
The silver lining in this dark cloud is that Donald Trump’s denunciation of the mainstream media has energized the media in its pursuit of true news, and it has drawn more and more readers and listeners and viewers to look for truth.
That’s the prize for America.