San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
John Diaz: The president who undermines trust in the news
President Trump picked a curious week to escalate his war on the news media by telling a group of veterans, “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.” It was the same week Americans were able to hear for themselves — without media filter or interpretation — that this is a president who thinks he can lie with impunity.
Trump’s latest attack on an independent news media, made in the context of coverage of his trade war, evoked echoes of George Orwell’s novel “1984,” about thought control in a dystopian world. “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command,” goes one of its famous passages.
Sales of the book spiked right after Trump’s election. It seems as if the leader of the free world might have read it not as a cautionary tale but as a playbook.
“Don’t believe the crap you see from these people,” Trump said at the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Kansas City, Mo. “CNN is the worst,” he said.
Journalists are not perfect, but accuracy is one of the ingrained values of the profession, and it is safe to say no organization has made anything close to 3,251 false or misleading claims since Jan. 20, 2017. That is the number of Trump untruths the Washington Post’s Fact Checker site has counted as of the end of May.
Americans don’t need to take anyone’s word about Trump’s audacious duplicity.
Remember just before the election when the Wall Street Journal reported a secret deal by the National Enquirer to silence former Playboy model Karen McDougal about her extended affair with Trump? His denial was emphatic. “We have no knowledge of any of this,” his spokeswoman Hope Hicks said, calling the affair claim “totally untrue.”
Yet last week, out came the recorded conversation between Trump and his now-estranged lawyer, Michael Cohen, that proved the then-candidate not only was aware of the deal before the Journal story broke — he was discussing whether hush money should be paid in cash or check (his attorney claims he was advocating a check, Cohen’s attorney said he was pushing for cash).
Either way, he knew.
The latest credibility buster came the week after he made the day-late and rather ludicrous attempt to suggest he misspoke in saying that he did not see any reason why Russia would interfere in the 2016 election. He claimed to have meant “I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be Russia.” He then undermined his own walk back by adding, “Could be other people also. There’s a lot of people out there.”
The millions of Americans who watched the Trump-Putin news conference in full could judge for themselves whether the media accounts of their president giving greater weight to a murderous tyrant than his own intelligence services were spot on. Yes, it’s safe to trust eyes and ears. In another brazen move to stifle scrutiny, the White House barred CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins last week from a Rose Garden appearance by the president. Her offense? The White House had objected to her questions when she served as a pool reporter — representing the major television networks — in the Oval Office earlier that day. She was asking about what she and any reasonable person would regard as the “news of the day”: the sudden turn against Trump by Michael Cohen, his former attorney and so-called fixer.
It’s important to note that the significance of these brief exchanges is magnified by the fact that Trump has conducted exactly one full-on, nationally televised news conference since his inauguration. It came on Feb. 16, 2017.
To their credit, other news organizations jumped to the defense of Collins and CNN — even its chief competitor, Fox News.
“We stand in strong solidarity with CNN for the right to full access for our journalists as part of a free and unfettered press,” Fox News President Jay Wallace said in a statement.
Another act of retaliation that illustrates the administration’s aversion to being challenged — and questions about its competence — was its threat to revoke the security clearances of former top officials who have countered the Trump expression of reality. Spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders publicly clicked off a list of names that included former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and ex-CIA Director John Brennan. Also included as targets were ex-FBI Chief James Comey and former Deputy Director Andrew McCabe — neither of whom has an active security clearance.
The move was petty and vindictive, and the explanations were laughable. Sanders suggested the Trump critics had “politicized” and “monetized” their public service, as if acts of crass opportunism were proscribed in this White House.
Trump’s actions are not only Orwellian, they are trademark authoritarian. I just returned from a three-week fellowship to Asia (with the East-West Center) in which I had a chance to speak with a variety of journalists from nations where media suppression is extreme. While the intensity of government efforts to delegitimize if not outright ban independent reporting is far greater than in the United States — shutdowns of outlets and jailing and even killing of journalists — the rhetoric and rationalizations of the tyrants in charge are strikingly similar to Trump’s.
Those regimes know their very survival depends on operating without the eyes and ears of the press upon them.
In trying to undermine news coverage, President Trump is trying to enjoy the same luxury.
John Diaz is The San Francisco Chronicle’s editorial page editor. Email: jdiaz@ sfchronicle.com Twitter: @JohnDiazChron
“Just remember ... what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.” President Trump, telling a Veterans of Foreign Wars audience last week not to “believe the crap you see from these people” in the news media
“The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” From George Orwell’s classic novel, “1984,” about a dystopian future under a totalitarian regime that suppresses critical thought