The Leadership Style of Duck the Media

Official portrait of Spiro Agnew.

In Des Moines Iowa almost 50 years ago (Jesus, I just made myself feel really old), Vice President Spiro Agnew famously decried the news media as the “nattering nabobs of negativism.”

Well, he didn’t call journalists “enemies” of the American people, but we’ve seen a thread of political vitriol from the right spreading over the decades. It turns out rejecting “coast” culture and decrying the media snobs who look down on the “real” America is a winning brand.

Agnew was a crook who worked for a crook, and both he and his boss Richard Nixon left office in disgrace. But Nixon was an evil political genius, and many of the strategies he unleashed during the turbulent late 1960s have become embedded in American political fabric. The GOP as a party of the White South? See Nixon. The “mainstream media” as a distrusted punching bag? See Nixon.

And now we are in the fragile election year of 2018, waiting to see how potent the poison in the well has become. We have an ignorant, misogynist, narcissistic president who is pumped up and rallying the boob troops. True, it’s too easy to underestimate Trump—he does have some entertainment instincts that seem to serve him eerily too well in American politics, where government seems to becoming show biz.

In the run up to the election, Trump is ratcheting up his delusional, politically charged lies. See this PBS interview with a media fact checker.

Image from Wikimedia Commons, by Gage Skidmore. Donald Trump in happier times--2011. He wasn't yet the liar-in-chief.

Trump says crazy stuff: Democrats are a liberal “mob.” A caravan of migrants is full of “bad people” were probably funded by Democrats. This self-described nationalist (the reason, sir, that you’re not supposed to use that word is because in politics it is the philosophy espoused by facists) lies, lies and lies some more. Because it works for him. His base doesn’t care—they just like the message.

And most of all they like to see those enemies in the media squirm.

The tragedy, to me, is not that it’s unfair to accuse the American media of bias. There are all kinds of bias built into our media system that should be recognized. But to term journalists as enemies of the people is breathtakingly ahistorical. We have a First Amendment that protects the press because our founding political philosophers understood that, perfect or not, independent purveyors of information were vital for democracy to maintain itself.

I don’t think Trump cares about democracy. He is way too chummy with authoritarians, and makes too many wild assertions to be taken seriously as a man who wants to lead or convince or persuade. He’s a bully with a bully’s worst instincts—and he loves leading a bully mob.

Anyway, the deterioration of respect for sellers of information has led Republicans down to the local level to shun media. I read a post on Facebook by a local state representative, Ashley Hinson, who was calling on this local newspaper to publish an op/ed written by her leader, the Republican speaker of the House of Iowa. But Representative Hinson herself is part of an awful trend. In 2012, running for the U.S. Senate, then candidate Joni Ernst eschewed meetings with major Iowa newspaper editorial boards.

Hinson herself did the same with the Gazette this year, and she is not alone. I’m sure she has an explanation for her decison, and I’m also sure I don’t want to hear it. Because whatever it is, as a former TV anchor she should know it's BS. Shame on her. Shame on Senator Ernst. Shame on Republicans who shun editorial boards in general. It’s fair to be critical of the media—but to refuse to sit down with working journalists and discuss issues with them is to disrespect the role that the press serves in our democracy.

The Gazette was right to complain about the trend. See their editorial.

Vice President Agnew had a bit of a point, even if he was a crook. In his time, print media were more conservative than today—his main complaints were about network television, which then was way more powerful than now in shaping public discourse. As a media professor, I think the spreading of outlets, the ability of anybody to publish anything (including this blog) can have positive impacts. Voices that were silent can be heard. Diverse points of view are readily available.

But the rallying cry of “fake news” that Agnew’s remarks eventually unleashed have reached a dangerous fever pitch.

And the right has won the war against news, in many ways. Mainstream media is in retreat.

But, what’s left in its place? Fox “News,” Russian trolls, Brietbart? It’s a vapid swamp of delusion and misinformation. Sort of like any political speech theses days by that national embarrassment, the liar-in-chief, Donald Trump.

The Darkness at our Door

Saw this today in a restroom at the university where I teach. It makes me think of what we are without journalism--earless, eyeless, brainless. And we're getting too close to that point.

The Washington Post’s motto is “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” Democracy is not dead in the U.S. yet, but I feel the fever is getting serious. Too much has happened recently that points to the rising darkness.

President Trump joked this week at a political rally in Montana about Rep. Greg Gianforte, who pled guilty to a misdemeanor assault charge for attacking a reporter for The Guardian during a previous election campaign. Trump has called journalists enemies, but making a joke of an assault in the same news cycles dominated by the murder of a Washington Post columnist is beyond being obnoxious or thoughtless, Trump’s usual base level of discourse.

It’s dangerous.

Jamal Khashoggi was murdered in Turkey, two weeks ago. President Trump has finally started to admit he is dead, although he has been full of inconsistent conspiracy theories to explain it away in some politically convenient fashion. As is so often the case, our addled president awaits enlightenment from the darkest corners of Fox News before he, standing at the levers of power of the American government, can make nonsense of events.

I was not familiar with Khashoggi’s work, but he was an American journalist. True, not a citizen, but a legal resident of the United States working for The Washington Post. And he was killed for it.

It’s not the only sign of journalism’s decline in what increasingly seems like a noisy Dark Age. This is fall break at the university where I teach, and my wife and I took a couple of days off to travel to central Missouri to ride on the Katy Trail. While there, I stopped in the town where I had been a newspaper editor 30 years ago, and purchased a copy of the paper.

A not-local paper. Sad.

I almost wish I had not. The “local” paper was hardly local at all.

The sorry state of local journalism is a tragedy in this country. We are slowly closing our minds to the role that a town conscious can fulfill. And we are becoming too frighteningly like those countries in other parts of the world where the press is dull, official, and irrelevant.

Jamal Khashoggi had his last column published by The Washington Post. In it, he wrote eloquently of the Arab world’s need for a free press:

“The Arab world needs a modern version of the old transnational media so citizens can be informed about global events. More important, we need to provide a platform for Arab voices. We suffer from poverty, mismanagement and poor education. Through the creation of an independent international forum, isolated from the influence of nationalist governments spreading hate through propaganda, ordinary people in the Arab world would be able to address the structural problems their societies face.”

Erase the word “Arab.” In this now great again country, we suffer from poverty of mind, mismanagement by our top leader and poor education in small towns where local events are no longer covered by local journalists.

Jamal thought he was writing about Saudi Arabia. His words come too close to describing America today.

President Trump makes jokes about assaulting journalists, who he terms as “enemies.” And his fans, betraying their ignorance, cheer.

The enemy is those who enjoy siloed lives, isolated form the world as it is. I hope darkness is not closing in too much, although I find myself more filled with dread as the mid-term election approaches and the Trump base is fired up for all the wrong reasons.

I hope voters decide to turn the lights on.