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.