The press is not the enemy of the people
What history might look like without news media
“The people ... have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right, to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean of the characters and conduct of their rulers.”
— John Adams, 1765
President Donald Trump recently called many media outlets “the enemy of the American people.” His press secretary, when given the chance to retract, deny or at least clarify that statement, refused to do so, instead listing off times that she herself has felt mistreated by journalists.
Presidents come and go, so do press secretaries. Ideas stick around longer. The idea of a free press, for example, as essential to America — protected by the First Amendment — predates this president by nearly 230 years.
When the idea that the press is the “enemy” starts to float around, we ought to be concerned. After all, you can name two other famous leaders in the past century who defined their critics as “enemies of the people”: Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and Chinese dictator Mao Zedong.
Let’s look at a world without a free press. If journalists are “the enemy,” then here is what the past 100 years or so might look like without them:
❚ Working conditions at meatpacking plants might never have been made humane. Mental asylums could have mistreated patients for decades.
❚ Sen. Joseph McCarthy and his communist witch hunt might have run rampant. The Vietnam War would be all rosy stories from the government.
❚ Richard Nixon would have finished his term as president. The Pentagon Papers, revealing the secrets in a war that killed nearly 60,000 of our soldiers and millions of Vietnamese, might never have been revealed.
❚ Discrimination in housing could have gone unchecked. Safety violations in cars and airplanes would be unreported. Water polluted by chemical plants would continue to be poisoned.
❚ President Bill Clinton would have not been impeached for his behavior with and about Monica Lewinsky.
❚ What you learned after the 9/11 terrorist attacks would be a fraction of what you know now, and Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld would have been your information sources.
❚ Improper payments in college sports could be regularly made as long as people kept quiet. Baseball players could be juicing on steroids. The NFL could laugh at concussion accusations.
Virtually all of what we know outside of our own homes, neighborhoods and workplaces is brought to us by some form of journalism. What would we know of cancer and cigarettes, devious mortgage practices, or awful behavior by religious figures if there were no reporters to look into it? And things outside this country? How much information about radical terrorist attacks or genocides in places such as Rwanda or Darfur would you be aware of without journalists reporting on it?
In nearly all of the cases I just mentioned, there were parties in power who hated the fact that they were being reported on, who wailed that they were being miscast.
If we stop looking at “the media” as the small group that covers the president’s press briefings, we’d recognize that the overwhelming amount of journalism practiced in this country is honorable and admirable and necessary.
Yes, the press is flawed. Yes, the press can be biased. Yes, the press sometimes gets it wrong. Yes, the press employs people who have their own agendas.
All of that is true.
But it is even more true of people in power. And as John Adams said, if those people are to rule us — in politics, in war, in business, in society — it is essential that we citizens always have “that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge,” the knowledge of their conduct and character.
If we banish journalists as the enemy of the people, who will provide this knowledge? Oh, that’s right. The rulers themselves. Which is exactly how they want it.
You make the choice.