General Michael Flynn’s resignation Monday night as Donald
Trump’s National Security Advisor came as no surprise to anyone familiar with
the ever-lengthening chain of events leading up to his announcement. More to
the point, no one who knows even a smidgen about Washington’s political sphere
and its symbiotic relationship with the media, came away from Flynn’s fall from
grace with more than a shrug and an “I told you so.”
During a White House press conference the following day,
press secretary Sean Spicer used the word “trust” dozens of times to describe
what no longer existed between Mr. Trump and Gen. Flynn. When pressed by the
media for additional details about Flynn’s resignation, Spicer suggested the
media was following the wrong story, that the real story was about the leaks
from the White House, and how government employees pass information to the
media.
The problem for Trump and his people is that they are
not—by choice—of the political sphere, and they do not understand, or want to
understand, the symbiosis necessary to maintaining what is admittedly a
delicate balance between an administration’s need to gather and process
information vital to national security, and the media’s need to inform the
public about actions related to the information. Information and inform. The
core creatures of the symbiosis.
Two events during John F. Kennedy’s brief administration illustrates
both sides of the symbiotic coin: The Bay of Pigs in 1961, and the Cuban
Missile Crisis in 1962.
When there is no symbiosis—no trust—between the White House
and the media, a botched and ugly event like the Bay of Pigs gets uglier
quickly, and the raft of dissembling stories that flowed from the White House
(or the stories that were kept locked away), did nothing to inspire trust
between the president and the media who reported on him. It also did nothing to
bolster trust between Kennedy and other world leaders who looked on in
amazement at the bolloxed operation.
When the symbiosis works, it looks something like the 1962
Cuban Missile Crisis, where President Kennedy, having been briefed on Cuba’s
buildup of missiles capable of striking the United States, and, having been
given several options of response, requested television time on the three major
networks on Monday evening, October 22. In his address, Kennedy laid out what
information he had—pictures and all—and what his response to Cuba and the
Soviet Union would be. The president’s remarks were strong, focused, and
reassuring, not only to Americans, but to other world leaders sitting on the
edges of their seats:
“I call upon Chairman Khrushchev to halt and eliminate this clandestine, reckless, and provocative threat to world peace and to stable relations between our two nations. I call upon him further to abandon this course of world domination and join in an historic effort to end the perilous arms race and transform the history of man.”
Contrast President Kennedy’s remarks 55 years ago, to this
statement from White House advisor Stephen Miller during a recent Sunday news
show: “Our opponents, the media
and the whole world will soon see as we begin to take further actions, that the
powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will
not be questioned.” And, of course, Donald
Trump’s persistent disparagement of the media is incomparable to any past president’s
relationship with the Fourth Estate.
No matter what demeaning words about the
media spread from this White House, it’s very important to understand that the
media gets no pass just for being the media. It is not enough to exist under
the quasi-protection of the First Amendment, which, when read closely, says
only that the “Congress shall make no law
respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise
thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press…”. A proscription
against Congressional fiat does not, alone, imbue a reporter or a news
organization with an inalienable, unfettered, right to write. It is the
public’s opinion of the media that gives, or takes away, its power to publish.
Alexander Hamilton said it best when he
wrote in Federalist 84,
“What signifies a declaration, that ‘the liberty of the press shall be inviolably preserved'? What is the liberty of the press? Who can give it any definition which would not leave the utmost latitude for evasion? I hold it to be impracticable; and from this I infer, that its security, whatever fine declarations may be inserted in any constitution respecting it, must altogether depend on public opinion, and on the general spirit of the people and of the government. And here, after all, as is intimated upon another occasion, must we seek for the only solid basis of all our rights.”
Public trust in the media can
be rendered ephemeral by a mere whiff of disbelief or government-instilled fear
(real or manufactured). When we, as journalists, do not enjoy a large
percentage of favorable ratings by the public for whom we write or broadcast,
our freedom is vulnerable. We are vulnerable now to forces pressing on us from
many directions, directions unimagined by the Founders or even journalists of
40 years ago. One instrument of those forces resides in the coat pocket of the
Chief Executive—it is a cell phone linked to Twitter, which, in turn, is linked
to millions of Americans who believe more in his incoming tweets than they do
in all the words we write or speak against him. That is his steamroller, and he,
his staff, and his followers are driving it straight for us.
I believe we must resist the
desire to build a barricade and fight from its ramparts. We must, instead, stand
firmly in front of the oncoming machine, reporting at every moment, never
blinking, and let the public see what our freedom looks like when it is truly
threatened. Remember a man, a tank, and Tiananmen Square.
This is our moment in the
square.
[For this and all my columns appearing in Huffington, please go to:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/vaspeechwriter-960]
No comments:
Post a Comment