...a grab bag in which I invite you to participate in a form of grabbing very
different from the one our new president has proclaimed himself a practitioner
of. Allow me to introduce myself. I’m Tim Loughman, born at the tail end of the
first half of the twentieth century. I live in California and would be retired
if I could afford to be and had had a career to retire from. The world being in
such dire need of more political commentary, I thought I’d offer some, and
occasionally some other stuff as well. I would ask that feedback be kept
vaguely within the parameters of civility, but I don’t foresee always complying
with that constraint myself, so I ask only that anyone wishing to post to this
blog try to avoid egregious vulgarity. What constitutes egregious vulgarity? Go
to YouTube and see the 2005 Access Hollywood video. That’s egregious vulgarity.
And in case anyone’s post sinks to Donald Trump’s level that way, I’ll do what
I wish I could do to his whole administration and delete it.
Speaking of Donald Trump, his concerted attempt to brand the mainstream
media as “the enemy of the American people” is perfectly apt for such an
unabashed admirer of Russian autocracy. Stalin imprisoned and/or executed
millions of people on the grounds that they were “enemies of the people.” Part
of the tweet in which Trump first used that expression was at least partly
true. He said the "FAKE NEWS" (his caps) media outlets in question—the
New York Times, ABC, NBC, CBS and CNN—are not his enemy, and in at least one
important sense he’s right. The disproportionate coverage the media in general
devoted to Trump during his bid for the Republican nomination may have proven
decisive in his winning it. There were eleven candidates on stage for the
second Republican debate, on September 16, 2015. CNN, the hosting network,
employed an occasionally split screen that evening, and the featured nonspeaker
in the split-screen segments was Donald Trump. The network he now so regularly
bashes implicitly accorded him a special status. It helped make him a star.
But in another sense the media outlets he demonizes are his
enemies and have no choice but to be. Every time he tells another whopper, he
forces them to be. If the president of the United States, or a major-party
nominee for that office, says or implies something patently false—about the size of an inauguration crowd or an
electoral college victory, or the vetting of immigrants, or the prevalence of
criminality among immigrants, or voter fraud, or the rigging of an election, or
the political affiliations of presidential debate monitors, or about an audit
being a bar to releasing one’s tax returns, or about imaginary terror attacks,
or imaginary celebrations of terror attacks, or the media’s supposed failure to
cover adequately or at all stories they have in fact covered extensively, or about
Ted Cruz’s father being involved in the Kennedy assassination, or anything else—the media have to hold him to account. Or
if he blatantly contradicts himself—on the
propriety of questioning another person’s religious faith, for instance, or on
abortion rights, or on foreign policy issues such as Libya, or on whether he
“knows” certain individuals such as Vladimir Putin or David Duke—again, the
media have to set the record straight. That’s their job. And in doing their job, they have no choice but
to oppose him in exposing his falsehoods. An honest person would appreciate
having people around who point out his mistakes. Donald Trump is emphatically
not honest. You’ll know for the duration of his presidency whether any given
media organization is doing its job by whether it’s on his shit list. Thank God
that list is as long as it is. I have enough faith in the press to predict with
confidence that it will get longer.
The mainstream media have long been derided by both left and
right. Sometimes the criticism is valid. The media consist of human beings.
Sometimes they get things wrong. But by and large, the people in the mainstream
media, in sharp contrast to Trump, are decent and honest. Like Trump, they have
a very important job. The harder he tries to keep them from doing that job, the
more important it becomes. We should all be conservatives when it comes to
conserving our democracy. A free press is absolutely vital to doing that. Anyone
who cheers Trump in his attacks on the media would presumably prefer to live in
a country, like Putin’s Russia, where the media serve as a propaganda arm of
the government, snarling at dissidents and fawning at the feet of those in
power. That predilection is not just un-American, it’s anti-American. You can’t
be truly patriotic and embrace it.
