My Book Report: The Silencing of the Fourth Estate
For authoritarians, the media is always Enemy Number One
By Deidre Depke
Farewell First Amendment?
My book club was here the other night, and we got to talking about historian Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny. Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century. The 2017 book is the definitive guide to identifying and surviving a society’s slide into authoritarianism. Snyder’s Number One warning:
Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked.
Hello, Jeff Bezos! The Washington Post owner hedged his bets during the election by ordering the Post to pull its endorsement of Kamala Harris. Billionaire surgeon and inventor Patrick Soon-Shiong, owner of The Los Angeles Times, did the same.
Their decisions are profiles in something – but it isn’t courage. Still, as we get closer to Donald Trump’s January 20 Inauguration (MLK Day!), their preemptive logic and attempts to curry favor might be sensibly strategic. The President-elect and his appalling minions have been very clear that one of their first priorities is an attack on the press.
One tactic: use the courts to undermine unfavorable reporting. Trump has promised to subpoena news organizations, prosecute journalists and their sources, revoke networks’ broadcast licenses, and eliminate funding for public radio and television.
Just last week, he sued The Des Moines Register for running the results of a survey by a well-respected local pollster that showed Kamala Harris leading him by several points right before the election — an explosive finding in deep-red Iowa. The unusual charge: violating Iowa’s consumer fraud laws. Trump won Iowa by 13 points and claims the poll was an attempt to mislead voters and influence the election. The Register has said it stands by its reporting, and its owner, Gannett, has successfully had the suit transferred to federal district court — at least for now.
How the novel approach in the Register case turns out remains to be seen, but the strategy of siccing legal pit bulls on the press has already paid dividends. Earlier this month, ABC News said it had agreed to give $15 million to Trump’s future presidential foundation and museum to settle a defamation suit Trump filed against the network and anchor George Stephanopoulos. The ABC anchor had erroneously said the former President had been found “liable for rape” in a civil trial. Trump was actually found guilty of sexual abuse.
Trump has a history of filing dumb lawsuits against the media. And legal scholars say the ABC settlement was an unnecessary bending of the knee: The network probably would have prevailed in court.
But valid or not, these legal actions undermine the reputations of reporters and their organizations. And they are expensive to defend. The result is a media that pulls its punches. The internal debate already underway in newsrooms: Is a particular story worth a fight with Trump?
Forget legislative or judicial protections for news organizations. Trump owns the Supreme Court, where radical-right justices are said to be eager to revisit precedent protecting a free press. And last week, Senate Republicans blocked passage of the PRESS Act (an acronym for the Protect Reporters from Exploitative State Spying Act). It would have prevented the government from forcing journalists to reveal their sources and limit the seizure of their data without their knowledge. After the bill passed the House earlier this year.
Trump had urged the Senate to kill it.
Pregaming Trump II
Many, many books have been written about the first Trump Administration. But there are two that rank as the definitive accountings of his first term in office. They are also (depressing) guides to what we can expect during the next four years.
The Divider, by The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser and her husband, Peter Baker of The New York Times, is described by its publisher as a deeply reported “inside story of Donald Trump’s war with Washington — from the chaotic beginning to the violent finale.” At 752 pages, The Divider is the most comprehensive catalogue of the administration’s infighting and cartoonish ineffectiveness. Don’t let the length put you off: The book is riveting.
The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward is an old hand at documenting presidencies in highly readable accounts. He published three books about the Trump White House: Fear, Rage, and Peril. The third, about the final days of the administration, was co-written and reported by Robert Costa of CBS News. It’s easily the best of Woodward’s efforts.
After more than half a century in Washington, Woodward can get just about any important power player on the phone, and Peril relies on his many deep sources. In all, he and Costa interviewed 200 people and compiled 6,000 pages of documents about what they describe as one of the most dangerous periods in American history. One key revelation: that General Mark Milley, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called his counterpart in the Chinese military to assuage Beijing’s fears about Trump launching some sort of American attack in the weeks leading up to Biden being sworn in.
These accounts of the Trump White House share a common theme: that the President’s agenda was consistently undermined by his administration’s ineptitude and the heroic efforts of insiders determined to defend democracy. No doubt most of Trump’s new Cabinet members and other top officials will prove to be largely incompetent. But they were chosen for blind loyalty, not their chops. This time, heroism and undermining Trump are not on anybody’s agenda.