Quote of the Day (Tom Wicker, on Exploiting Unhappiness for ‘The Amusement or Titillation of Others’)

“When I dragged myself into the [Sandhill] Citizen office about noon the next day, I had a visitor — a worn-out looking woman with a ZaSu Pitts voice, but whose once-haggard eyes were blazing, whose fluttering hands were clenched into fists, and whose graying hair…was that of a woman not too many years older than I, who not too long before probably had been considered a peach by the boys in her high-school class. ‘Mr. Wicker,’ she said without preamble, ‘why did you think you had the right to make fun out of me in your paper?’ I have never forgotten that question — and I still can't answer it…. I remember thinking I had not bargained for such awful moments when I had landed my first reporter’s job a few months before. Accurate though my story had been, and based on a public record, it nevertheless exploited human unhappiness for the amusement or titillation of others. I had made the woman in my office something less than what she was — a human being possessed, despite her misfortunes, of real dignity. Seeing that, I saw too that I had not only done her an injury but missed the story I should have written. This is one of the besetting sins of journalism—sensationalism at the expense of the dignity and truth of the common human experience. I have been fortunate to have worked mostly for publishers and editors who sought to avoid that sin — not always successfully. And reading some of the more lurid journals, I've often thought that sensationalism and gossip columns tend to be techniques employed mostly by big-circulation publications for an anonymous audience. Not many editors and reporters would be callous or unseeing enough to engage in them if they had to face the victims the next morning over a battered desk in an office not much bigger than a closet. On the other hand, in small cities and towns, where the overwhelming majority of American newspapers are published, circulating to millions more readers than The New York Times or The Washington Post ever reach, newspaper publishers and editors have difficulty looking at their communities objectively and serving them dispassionately.”—American journalist and novelist Tom Wicker (1926-2011), On Press (1978)

When I read On Press, it was halfway through the quarter century stint as a liberal New York Times columnist by Tom Wicker, born a century ago today in Hamlet, N.C. It also came during the heroic period of American journalism, flush with its newly extended freedoms from the 1971 Pentagon Papers decision by the Supreme Court and muckraking coverage of Watergate that brought down Richard Nixon.

Wicker’s sharp criticisms led to a long-secret FBI investigation under J. Edgar Hoover (exposed not long after the columnist’s death in 2011 in this Politico piece) and placement on Nixon’s “enemies list” that was revealed during the latter’s Presidency.

How quaint that list seems now! That “master list” totaled some 220 people or organizations—a number probably exceeded in only two or three overnight tweet storms by Donald Trump against press “enemies of the people” and “traitors.”

Predictability constitutes an occupational hazard for anyone presenting their opinions to the public several times a week. For the longest time, in Wicker’s case, I thought that a reader could almost unerringly anticipate his conclusions even before starting one of his articles.

To his credit, Wicker acknowledged such dangers, telling attendees at a 1978 American Enterprise Institute Public Policy Forum, “I felt, almost from the beginning, that I was preaching to the converted. If people agree with me, they read my articles with enormous enjoyment. If not, they sit there and fume. I do not think it has much effect on what people do.”

I don’t think I was the only reader how, long after Wicker clashed with Nixon over Watergate and Vietnam, he gave the ex-President a more respectful assessment in One of Us: Richard Nixon and the American Dream, going so far as to praise a number of his domestic initiatives (including, surprisingly, for this candidate who implemented a “southern strategy” for wooing conservative Democrats, desegregation of the South). 

In fact, by barely considering Watergate, I felt that this analysis was a bit too respectful, losing sight of abuses of power that contributed to what historian Arthur M. Schlesinger called “the imperial Presidency.”

The humility that Wicker exhibited in my opening quote was kept in a delicate balance with a professional detachment that the journalist found necessary for press independence.

“Questions and criticism, though often inconvenient and sometimes embarrassing, are necessary in a democracy and part of the responsibility of a free press,” he wrote in a March 1985 column that took Senator Jesse Helms and Reagan Administration officials for questioning the patriotism of the media.

Such “questions and criticism” of Presidents, increasingly undermined within the federal bureaucracy and abdicated by Congress and the Supreme Court, have become even more the province of the media. They won’t make reporters more popular but will make them more crucial for the maintenance of the American republic.

Quote of the Day (Jimmy Carter, on Criticism and Scrutiny of Government Officials)

“Thoughtful criticism and close scrutiny of all government officials by the press and the public are an important part of our democratic society. Now, as in the past, only the understanding and involvement of the people through full and open debate can help to avoid serious mistakes and assure the continued dignity and safety of the Nation.”—Jimmy Carter, 39^th President of the United States (1924-2024), “Farewell Address to the Nation,” Jan. 14, 1981

Quote of the Day (Carl Hiaasen, on the Growing Necessity for Reporters)

“People can’t get outraged [at the political arena] without rapid access to solid, useful information—what we used to call journalism. There’s so much garbage being disguised as fact and so many gasbags posing as sages; somebody has to cut through the crap. That’s the job of reporters, and their job will be more important than at any time in history. There’s been this great lamentation about the end of newspapers as we know them, the end of the era of the paper hitting your doorstep in the morning, but I don’t think the language or the craft of writing is dying. In the next 40 years, there’s going to be a larger demand than ever for people who can communicate with the written word, whatever format it takes.”—American crime novelist and retired Miami Herald columnist Carl Hiaasen, “Slipping Backward” (part of a “40 Things To Know” article cluster), interviewed by T. A. Frail, Smithsonian, July-August 2010

Fifteen years ago today, in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court opened the floodgates for unlimited campaign spending to corporations and other outside groups by ruling that any restrictions constituted a violation of freedom of speech.

In his Smithsonian Q&A, Hiaasen denounced the decision as “toxic to the whole democratic process,” and correctly predicted that “From now on, it’s basically going to be all the free speech that money can buy.”

Besides the communication skill that Hiaasen identified, more will be needed for the journalism of the present and future to affect the political process, however: the fearlessness of its practitioners and the open-mindedness of its readers. The portents for both these factors are deeply troubling right now.

While the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has twisted freedom of speech beyond recognition, it has permitted a lack of legal accountability for a President’s misdeeds and signaled, through Associate Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, that its landmark New York Times v. Sullivan freedom of the press ruling might be up for reconsideration.

Even with an unfettered press, there’s no guarantee that, in the present digital environment dominated by what Hiaasen calls “gasbags posing as sages,” their revelations will be acted upon. 

“Confirmation bias”—the tendency to seek out and accept anything supporting our beliefs and ignoring anything contradicting them—has only solidified in the current polarized environment.

I’m not sure that I am any more hopeful than Hiaasen was 15 years ago. I only know that not to push back against these troubling trends constitutes preemptive, unconditional surrender that will haunt the democratic process now and into the foreseeable future. 

(For more information on the baleful effects of Citizen United—including the influx of secret “dark money” into elections—and what can be done to bring about campaign finance reform, I urge you to read Tim Lau’s December 2019 report for the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice.)

Quote of the Day (John Milton, on the Need for Vigorous Debate in Speech and the Press)

“Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making.” —English poet John Milton (1608-1674), Areopagitica: A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing, to the Parliament of England (1644)

Quote of the Day (Walter Lippmann, on ‘Victims of Agitation and Propaganda’)

“Men who have lost their grip upon the relevant facts of their environment are the inevitable victims of agitation and propaganda. The quack, the charlatan, the jingo…can flourish only where the audience is deprived of independent access to information.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning American reporter and political commentator Walter Lippmann (1889-1974), Liberty and the News (1920)

Quote of the Day (Hannah Arendt, on How ‘Anything Can Happen’ Without a Free Press)

“The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows.

“And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.”— German-born political philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), to French writer Roger Errera in 1974, in “Hannah Arendt: From an Interview,” The New York Review of Books, Oct. 26, 1978

‘The Combination of the Few’: Slavery, Trumpism, and Violence Against the Media

“Who are the men that issue this invitation to silence the press by violence? Who but an insolent, brawling minority, a few noisy fanatics, who claim that their own opinions shall be the measure of freedom for the rest of the community, and who undertake to overawe a vast, pacific majority by threats of wanton outrage and plunder? These men are for erecting an oligarchy of their own and riding rough-shod over the people and the people’s rights. They claim a right to repeal the laws established by the majority in favor of the freedom of the press. They make new laws of their own, to which they require that the rest of the community shall submit, and, in case of a refusal, they threaten to execute them by the ministry of a mob. There is no tyranny or oppression exercised in any part of the world more absolute or more frightful than that which they would establish. So far as we are concerned, we are determined that this despotism shall neither be submitted to nor encouraged. In whatever form it makes its appearance, we shall raise our voice against it…. We hold that this combination of the few to govern the many by the terror of illegal violence is as wicked and indefensible as a conspiracy to rob on the highway. We hold it to be the duty of good citizens to protest against it whenever and wherever it shows itself, and to resist it, if necessary, to the death.”— Journalist-poet William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878), “Abolition Riots,” New York Evening Post, Aug. 8, 1836, in Power for Sanity: Selected Editorials of William Cullen Bryant,1829-1861, compiled and edited by William Cullen Bryant II (1994)

I suppose that we should count our blessings when President Trump acts merely “combative, humorous and boastful” at the press conference this week described by The New York Times’ Julie Hirschfeld Davis. After all, if he had a crowd larger than the reporters gathered in that room—like one of those ravenous rallies he enjoys with supporters out in the American Heartland—journalists might eventually hear something along the lines of, “People are telling me I should have them dragged out and thrown to the wolves.”

The fear of physical harm to the media is nothing new, as I was reminded in the above quote I found recently in a kind of message in a bottle: an American Literature textbook of the early 1950s created especially for Catholic high schools. One of the writers included was William Cullen Bryant, whose poems “Thanatopsis” and “To a Waterfowl” I had encountered previously in a college American lit survey course. 

But I had never read any of Bryant’s nonfiction writings—mostly produced in a half-century as owner and editor of the New York Evening Post—until I came across this excerpt from an editorial denouncing violence perpetrated by a mob against an abolitionist newspaper. 

Bryant—for whom the park behind the main branch of the New York Public Library was named—wrote these words at an urgent moment in American history, and I discovered them at a similar one today. They hurled defiance at the proponents of entrenched privilege who hoped to intimidate the press from espousing alternative points of view and from revealing ugly truths. 

In the 1830s, the “combination of the few to govern the many” consisted of Southern plantation owners and their smaller cadre of Northern sympathizers. Today, it consists of a different set of “noisy fanatics”; a lying, bullying New York real estate developer who somehow convinced a sizable portion of the Republican Party, then the nation, to vote for him as President; the opportunists who went along for the ride; and GOP officeholders now terrified of taking him head-on lest they lose their jobs.

What the “combination of the few,” then and now, have in common is the fear that aggressive reporting might bring to light unsettling questions about accommodations to a human-rights monstrosity: a racism-based, mercantile-enhanced slave system in antebellum America, and a nationalist authoritarian regime in post-Communist Russia that now has an ally in the 21st-century U.S.

It is ironic indeed that Trump and the ideologue who passes as his “brain trust,” Steve Bannon, look to Andrew Jackson as a forbear in their battle against the elites, for it was Jacksonian Democrats, firmly entrenched in the South, who attempted to stamp out criticism of the source of their power: cheap, ill-gotten slave labor. To accomplish that, the Jacksonians not only passed the infamous “Gag Rule”—the most serious Congressional attempt in American history to interfere with the right of petition—but fomented mob violence against the abolitionist press.

The “Abolition Riot” that drew Bryant’s denunciation was perpetrated against The Philanthropist, a newspaper founded by anti-slavery advocate James Birney. It consisted not simply of riff-raff but also of two of the most respectable leaders in town—Judge Jacob Burnet and banker, winemaker and art patron Nicholas Longworth—and was observed, silently but approvingly, by Mayor Samuel W. Davies. The mob not only tore apart the paper’s presses but threw a part of it into the river—and when they did not find Birney at home they turned on the African-American community, smashing up homes along the way. 

Though Birney escaped physical harm that night, another Midwestern abolitionist editor, Elijah Lovejoy, was not so fortunate a year later. Having had three of his presses already destroyed, he drew his gun to prevent a fourth from being wrecked in Alton, Ill., when he was killed (an act depicted in the image accompanying this post). It was the logical culmination of a period when slaveholders tried to suppress not just unrest among the slaves they directly controlled but dissent among the whites beyond their ken.

As bad as abolitionist editors had it, they did not have to contend with instant communications from a President who could summon mobs to do his bidding. “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and wouldn’t lose any voters, ok?” candidate Donald Trump said in January 2016. “It’s, like, incredible.”  

Since Trump, despite his reputation from The Apprentice, has had difficulty firing people himself, one doubts he would have the nerve to fire a gun against an irate, righteous citizen. Instead, he would get others to do it—like a mob, whose citizens collectively surrender their consciences. 

The President has never come right out and commanded mayhem and murder toward his critics, mind you. But he does so much through a conspiratorial nod and smirk between him and his followers. 

Sometimes it might involve a calculated silence, followed by approving verbiage from this least subtle of politicians. Montana Congressman Greg Gianforte, for instance, slammed Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs to the ground, after being asked a question he didn’t like about the GOP healthcare bill. A tape of the attack proved definitively that Gianforte committed the assault, then lied to police about it. Yet supporters awarded him a win at the polls. 

Not only did Trump never condemn the assault, but he strongly implied an endorsement of it. “I’ll tell you what, this man has fought — in more ways than one — for your state,” Trump said. “He has fought for your state. Greg Gianforte. He is a fighter and a winner.”

Even more striking if Trump’s consistent, odd refusal to condemn Russian President Vladimir. "They said, you know, he's killed reporters. I'd never kill them," Trump said at one rally in Grand Rapids, Mich. "But I do hate them. Some of them are such lying, disgusting people."

Please read that statement again. They said, you know, he’s killed reporters. Yes, dozens of them, according to a Scott Simon report on NPR back in April. Yet the President’s tone suggests only that the Russian leader is a bit…excitable. Sort of like a college frat boy who gets into a drunken scrape with the police. 

Instead, his real scorn is reserved for reporters—people who doubtless never feared until now, unlike those in Russia, that their lives are at stake with every critical word that they write about a President.

Even before the 2016 campaign, Trump would routinely threaten reporters and editors with litigation. Since then, he has escalated to insults and denunciations of the media for spreading “fake news” and, more seriously, for being the “enemy of the people,” an epithet once routinely employed under Josef Stalin.

That has been enough to incite his followers. Shirts have been sold at Trump rallies reading "Rope, Tree, Journalist: Some assembly required." NBC’s Katy Tur has described the atmosphere at the Grand Rapids rally this way: “The arena is packed, and it's a basketball stadium so the seats go very steep. The media, there was like 30, 40 people surrounded on all sides. And Donald Trump leaves, and so does the Secret Service, and suddenly it's like anybody can do anything in there."

Reporters like Tur who cover Trump rallies now must be prepared to be verbally harassed, beaten and thrown to the ground—in at least one instance, by a Trump staffer (in 2016, by hideous campaign operative Corey Lewandowski—who now, irony of ironies, makes money off the very group he attempted to physically manhandle, as a political commentator for CNN).

Even away from such stages, the poisonous rhetoric and helpful little hints have had their effect. Last month, a California man termed Boston Globe employees the “enemy of the people” in the course of threatening to shoot them. (Fortunately, he was arrested.)

After staffers at Annapolis, Maryland’s Capital Gazette were killed in June, Trump issued a statement saying that “journalists, like all Americans, should be free from the fear of being violently attacked while doing their job.” But it came with the same dry, perfunctory tones with which he’d delivered his sort-of apology for his Access Hollywood tape about groping women, or his walk-back criticism of white separationists in Charlottesville. Before long, he was back to doing and saying what came naturally.

The hypocrisy of Trump’s braying about how this group has done him wrong defies description. All of this comes from a real estate developer who thrived on publicity, even of a critical sort. Reporters he could not use to inflate his reputation could be turned into his foils. Far from being enemies of him, let alone “the people,” journalists should be on his permanent Christmas mailing list.

Instead of squelching opposition to slavery, the attempt to intimidate 1830’s press critics like Birney and Lovejoy only hastened a realignment of party politics, with Northerners such as Lincoln’s future Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon Chase, turning to anti-slavery parties. Trump is pushing 21^st century American politics toward a similar partisan hardening. 

The President has made much ado about his scorn toward the “lying, disgusting” people who chronicle what he says and does. But even at this still-early stage of his administration, more and more Americans are realizing that he just professes to despise the same qualities he finds every morning in his own mirror.

Quote of the Day (Joseph Pulitzer, on Democracy, Secrecy and the Press)

“We are a democracy and there is only one way to get a democracy on its feet in the matter of its individual, its social, its municipal, its state, its national conduct and that is by keeping the public informed about what is going on. There is not a crime, there is not a dodge, there is not a trick, there is not a swindle, there is not a vice, which does not live in secrecy. Get these things out in the open, describe them, attack them, ridicule them in the press, and sooner or later public opinion will sweep them away."—New York World editor Joseph Pulitzer (1847-1911) quoted in Alleyne Ireland, Joseph Pulitzer: Reminiscences of a Secretary (1920)

Let's see the press do its job this year.