Read free or democracy dies

Freedom of the press and journalists are under assault across the globe.

In 2017 governments jailed 262 journalists. Across Europe “Little Trumps” have curtailed press freedom, taking their cue from Big Trump. In the United States police arrested 34 journalists at protest events.

But press freedom is about much more than Comrade Donald echoing Josef Stalin and calling the media “the enemy of the people.” There cannot be a printed free press if there are no newspapers. In the last decades, as advertisers and readers moved online, newspapers declined precipitously. In 2006 newsroom jobs peaked at about 55,000; by 2015 they slipped to under 35,000 and were falling.

Many more people produce and distribute newspapers: from 1990 to 2016, these jobs fell from nearly 485,000 to 180,000. Circulation and the value of papers have declined. Press freedom involves robust investigative journalism, which few small city newspapers can now afford. Kudos to the Herald-Leader for giving its reporters frequent investigative assignments.

Several years ago the Columbia Journalism Review published an article about the U.S. effort to build democratic institutions in the defeated World War II enemies, Germany and Japan. Our government invested millions in establishing newspapers, censored at first, to help establish representative government.

Federal support for our own struggling newspapers would invigorate democratic discourse. In the early American republic, Congress did subsidize newspapers, indirectly. The Post Office Act of 1792, which provided for the expansion of the postal system across the Appalachians, admitted newspapers into the mails at extremely low rates. The number of post offices and newspapers grew together, with the U.S. having the best postal system in the world by 1828. The circulation of newspapers contributed to what historians have called the “communications revolution.”

Along with vituperative rhetoric, Comrade Donald has imitated his friend Vladimir by encouraging direct government interference with the press, calling for a change in the libel laws, urging the Federal Communications Commission to challenge the licenses of TV networks he dislikes, urging the Senate Intelligence Committee to investigate those networks, and recently taking away the White House press pass from Jim Acosta of CNN.

On June 28 a right-wing zealot with a history of hating the Annapolis Capital Gazette stormed in and shot and killed five journalists and seriously wounded two others. Five days later Trump referred to the press as “the opposition party.” Two days after the shooting Acosta had the temerity to shout at Trump “when are you going to stop calling the press ‘the enemy of the people?’”

Over the past two years Trump has issued several hundred tweets labeling exposures of his lies “fake news.” Anthony Scaramucci, who served briefly as his press secretary, pointed out that Trump is “an intentional liar,” and he does so because it solidifies his loyal base. One poll in December 2017 found that over 60 percent of Trump supporters saw the media as “the enemy of the people.”

Following a particularly vicious Trump attack on ABC, NBC, CNN, CBS and the New York Times, Republican Sen. Ben Sasse observed that Trump was undermining the First Amendment but “weaponizing distrust.” Again, his tactic is working. Throughout 2017 and 2018, polls showed significant numbers of people believing the major media are biased and make up stories. A recent poll showed trust in “mainstream media” at an all time low, although many find their favorite network credible.

The public’s capacity to evaluate credibility, however, is itself suspect. A 2016 Pew Center research questionnaire asked respondents to distinguish between five statements of fact and five statements of opinion. Just 26 percent of Americans could tell the difference.

Truth is becoming what The Leader says it is, objective facts are being obliterated. That leads to authoritarian government.

That is the real danger of Comrade Donald weaponizing distrust. He is succeeding, with his loyal base and beyond, in dissolving a shared realm of facts essential to democratic discourse, and Republican Party leaders, from Mitch McConnell on down have followed his lyin’ ways down the rabbit hole. Social media and other causes have contributed to this pathology: tribal polarization, the fracturing of news consumption, the lies of Breitbart and other conspiracy purveyors on the internet capturing a minor but significant share of the public.

But Trump has promoted and entrenched this civic cancer, moving sectors of his fellow citizens into ever darker caves of misinformation and delusion.

This story was originally published November 16, 2018 at 9:54 PM.