Trump is seeking to turn journalists into enemies and lies into dogma

He doesn’t need to shut down newspapers; it is enough for him to turn truth into suspicion and lies into spectacle. This column includes the ten greatest achievements of the United States press.

Gonzalo Guillén / La Nueva Prensa*

 “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” Thomas Jefferson.

Where the press is gagged, democracy is asphyxiated. This idea, so often repeated in multiple ways around the world, finds its full relevance in the political history of the United States. This is not a high-sounding sentence, nor a moral luxury. It is a founding principle. The Constitution’s First Amendment, enshrining freedom of speech and of the press, only gave legal form to a deep need: that power is observed, that citizens are informed, that truth – always elusive – can at least be attempted.

The United States press, unlike its Colombian counterpart, was not born to toady to the powerful but to monitor their acts. That is where its grandeur and its danger come from. Its role is not to decorate democracy but to maintain it. Without a free press, government becomes dark, abuses multiply in the shadows and citizens end up disorientated in a labyrinth of propaganda or silence.

Throughout its history, the United States has oscillated between reverential respect for its media and ferocious attacks against its legitimacy.

At a time of war, scandal and polarisation, journalism has become a target for insults, threats and attempts at censorship. However, each time that has happened, the press has responded not with submission but with bravery. Bravery that seems to be becoming rarer.

There have been times when the newspapers have pushed the boundaries of moral decency and times when they have crossed ethical lines unforgivably. But at the crucial moments, when democracy has tottered, it has been reporters, editors and photographers that have held it up. Not because they are saints but through a mixture of conviction, determination and a sense of duty.

Today, that freedom is under siege. Ideological polarisation has poisoned public confidence. The term fake news, cynically used to discredit uncomfortable truths, has moved the debate towards suspicion. Journalists, in recent times respected witnesses to the facts, are now perceived as part of an ideological apparatus. The result is not insignificant: a citizenry increasingly incapable of distinguishing between data and manipulation, research and propaganda.

And yet it has never been so urgent to defend the right to inform and to be informed.

The press does not just transmit data, it seeks it out, interprets it, contextualises it and verifies it.

It is not enough to have access to information; it is necessary to have access to information that is accurate, corroborated and rigorously prepared.

The freedom of the press does not just protect journalists; it protects citizens. It is not a corporate privilege but a common asset.

If one wanted to measure the vitality of a democracy, it would suffice to observe how it treats its journalists.

Wherever reporters are harassed, censored or persecuted (including by their own bosses), freedom begins to die. When the independent media is systematically discredited, society is disarmed in the face of power. Defending the free press equates to defending uncomfortable truths, honest and legitimate dissidence, the right to knowledge.

The history of the United States is strewn with episodes where the press was more than a witness: it was a motor, a catalyst, an instrument of change. For the sake of that legacy, it is worth recalling a few moments when North American journalism not only did its duty but did it with grandeur and inspirational bravery.

Ten defining moments for press freedom in the United States

1.  Richard Nixon’s resignation, a direct consequence of the Watergate scandal, would never had happened without the tenacity of two Washington Post journalists, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. In a climate of political intimidation, their investigations unmasked an espionage network that was corroding the heart of the executive power. They didn’t write to please but to reveal, to inform.
2. In 1971, The New York Timesand other newspapers published the Pentagon Papers, secret documents that demonstrated how successive administrations had deceived the country over the Vietnam War. The government tried to censor their dissemination; the Supreme Court defended the right to publish. It was a victory for the press over the state.
3. Decades before, in 1906, Upton Sinclair denounced the sub-human conditions in meatpacking plants in The Jungle, a book that led to health reforms and food regulations. His propagandist style did not prevent consciences being awakened and laws being changed. The pen became a social scalpel.
4. In 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire killed 146 workers trapped by closed doors and insufficient staircases. The newspaper coverage – raw, photographic, implacable – led to labour reforms that endure to this day. Without those images, the tragedy would have been just another statistic.
5. Going back to the eighteenth century, the case of John Peter Zenger in 1735 is almost seminal. The printer was put on trial for criticising the colonial governor of New York. The jury absolved him. It was thus established that speaking the truth could not be a crime, not even when it made those in power uncomfortable.
6. In the 1950s and 1960s, television showed the whole country the brutality of southern racism. Pictures of police officers attacking peaceful demonstrators, of children being arrested and of bombed-out churches shook the national conscience. The civil rights movement gained ground thanks, in part, to the implacable witness of the cameras.
7. In the period known as muckraking at the beginning of the twentieth century, journalists like Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens exposed corporate and government corruption with an almost religious zeal. Their work led to antitrust laws, urban reforms and new public ethics.
8. The Vietnam War, unlike previous conflicts, was played out on television. Pictures of bodies, burnt hamlets and soldiers driven insane by the horror changed perceptions of the conflict. The official narrative was no longer enough. The press made the country take a long, hard look at itself in the mirror.
9. In 2004, the revelation of abuses in the Iraqi Abu Ghraib prison showed the world images of brutality that the Pentagon had preferred to bury. The photographs, published by CBS News and The New Yorker, provoked global indignation and obliged even the world’s most powerful army to respond.
10. More recently, in 2017, the Washington Post published testimony from women accusing the judge Roy Moore, at the time a candidate for the Senate, of inappropriate sexual conduct. The journalistic investigation not only had electoral consequences, it marked a social limit. The press, once more, did not allow itself to be intimidated.

A freedom that allows no respite

Silencing the press does not always require official censorship. Sometimes systematic discrediting, financial pressure or the saturation of news is enough. A lie repeated, a scandal inflated, a piece of data manipulated: these are the new forms of censorship.

That is why defending a free press does not mean accepting everything it publishes. It means accepting that it must exist, make mistakes, correct itself and carry on. A society without independent journalists becomes a blind society. And a democracy without eyes soon falls flat on its face.

NOTE: On the subject of press freedom, I invite you to read the Research section of La Nueva Prensa in which you will find all the denunciations, among them the most revealing ones of the past few years in Colombia, such as the Ñeñepolítica, the marriage of the nation’s attorney-general to the Clan del Golfo, and Álvaro Uribe Vélez and his association’s links to the Sinaloa cartel’s drug pilots. Work which cost legal battles, persecution and threats.

*Article originally published in La Nueva Prensa.

(Translated by Philip Walker – Email: philipwalkertranslation@gmail.com) – Photos: Pixabay