Press is essential to American democracy
“There is no more essential ingredient than a free, strong and independent press to our continued success in what the Founding Fathers called our noble experiment in self-government.”
Who said this? Some know-it-all lawyer from the American Civil Liberties Union? The self-important chieftain of an elite coastal media outlet?
Nope. It came from Ronald Reagan, the 40th president of the United States and an enduring lodestar for American conservatives.
However, many conservatives in the Trump era seem to have forgotten Reagan’s advice and, indeed, the pronouncements that were made by the founders about the value of the free press. In fact, it’s embedded right there in the First Amendment to the Constitution, that the freedom of the press is not to be abridged.
And yet since the start of the Trump era, many of the same folks who claim to revere the Constitution down to the last comma have argued that the press is not an essential component of American democracy but fraudulent and “fake.” President Trump himself has called the Fourth Estate “the enemy of the American people” and opined that the media “doesn’t represent the people, it never will represent the people and we’re going to do something about it.”
Of course, there’s also the video the president shared with his Twitter followers over the weekend that depicted him punching and body-slamming a man with the CNN logo superimposed on his face. And this came just hours after his social media fusillade against MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski.
Sure, it’s childish and undignified. But add it all up, and it’s the kind of dangerous rhetoric that you would expect from a tin-pot autocrat in a country where state news is the only news and political opponents have an unfortunate tendency to disappear in the middle of the night and are never heard from again.
First, it should be said that “the media” that is being so roundly vilified is not a single entity, but a many-headed hydra made up of a variety of human beings making their own decisions every day. The media includes some of the most recognizable people on the planet, and reporters working at small community newspapers who keep their eyes trained on mayors, county commissioners and high school sports teams. Just like any profession, it has seen legends and scoundrels, and the people working within the media have varying skill levels and abilities.
Do reporters and editors make mistakes? Absolutely. It’s been frequently said that journalism is the first draft of history, and first drafts are rarely perfect. But reporters and editors have an obligation to correct the record when they find out they have erred. Whatever mistakes are made do not invalidate the worth or value of the whole enterprise.
Journalists follow the facts wherever they lead, and try to shine a spotlight on the truth, however unpleasant or uncomfortable that proves to be.
Trump is hardly the first president to be less than pleased with the way he is covered. Some of our best presidents were the subject of brickbats in their day. But reporting that scrutinizes public officials from the president on down, and sizes up their failures and successes, helps keep them honest and accountable. It is indeed an essential part of our democracy.
An observation once made by Samuel Adams, one of this country’s founders, is appropriate: “There is nothing so fretting and vexatious, nothing so justly terrible to tyrants and their tools and abettors, as a free press.”