How democracies die

Aug 2nd, 2018 | By
Category: Notes and Comment Blog

Lawrence Tribe got my attention.

So let’s read that Times article:

In the back of a fairground auditorium in Tampa, Fla., on Tuesday night, as President Trump presided over a rally dedicated to denigrating his enemies, the journalists dispatched to cover the proceedings attracted their own raucous crowd.

“Stop lying!” shouted a man in an American flag T-shirt, one of dozens of Trump supporters who hurled invective at the assembled press corps. Facing the reporters’ work space — and away from the stage where Mr. Trump was set to speak — they flashed middle fingers and chanted “CNN Sucks!” as Jim Acosta, a CNN White House correspondent, attempted to speak on-air.

The “hate the media” theme was already big during Trump’s campaign, but it’s been ratcheting up.

In Tampa, though, several journalists described an atmosphere of hostility that felt particularly hard-edge. And far from condemning these attacks on the press, the president and his team have endorsed them.

That night, Mr. Trump tweeted out a video of his supporters jeering Mr. Acosta, along with an approving comment from his son Eric: “#truth.” When the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, was invited at Wednesday’s press briefing to condemn the menacing behavior, she declined.

“While we certainly support freedom of the press,” Ms. Sanders said, “we also support freedom of speech. And we think that those things go hand in hand.”

Without freedom of speech, how can fascists work up mass hatred of the media, the Jews, the blacks, the Mexicans, the Bosnians, the Tutsis, the Rohingya?

The president has recently revived his “enemy of the people” line about the mainstream news media, sprinkling the phrase into his public remarks. The new White House communications chief, Bill Shine, a former president of Fox News, signaled a tougher approach to press relations when he barred a CNN reporter from a public event last week in the Rose Garden. The reason? She asked questions of Mr. Trump in what the White House deemed an inappropriate manner for an event in the Oval Office.

The trouble with an independent news media is, they can and sometimes do expose the lies of the Beloved Ruler.

Sean Hannity, perhaps Mr. Trump’s most reliable defender on cable news, directly addressed Mr. Acosta on Tuesday night at the start of his program on Fox News.

“The people of this country, they’re screaming at you for a reason,” Mr. Hannity said. “They don’t like your unfair, abusively biased treatment of the president of the United States.”

The one who lies to us multiple times every single day.

Press freedom groups have long warned that Mr. Trump’s rhetoric — and the accompanying criticism from his supporters — is endangering journalists domestically and abroad, particularly under autocratic regimes that have adopted his language in cracking down on independent journalism.

Never mind that, the principle of absolute freedom of rhetoric makes warnings of that kind an infringement on our precious right to work up hatred and rage.

After Trump lied on Twitter about his conversation with Sulzberger, he opened a new front.

Ms. Sanders picked up on that theme at her briefing on Wednesday, the press secretary’s first question-and-answer session with reporters in nine days. (Ms. Sanders held only three formal news briefings in July, compared with nearly once a day in the early part of her tenure.)

“The media routinely reports on classified information and government secrets that put lives in danger and risk valuable national security tools,” Ms. Sanders told reporters, going on to cite a debunked story that a report about Osama bin Laden in the 1990s had harmed national intelligence efforts. (President George W. Bush has made the same claim, that a report about Bin Laden’s use of a satellite phone had tipped him off to surveillance; the information had been released by the Taliban two years earlier.)

Be careful out there.

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