The American Press: Necessary Momentum for Solidarity

The truth is not absolute and media coverage is not always an exact science. The media don’t always live up to their ethical standards. They make mistakes and do not always correct them. The business interests they defend sometimes conflict with the requirements of informed information. Many journalists deserve to be called to task for their complacency toward the powers that be.

This means that there will always be a place in the newsroom for self-criticism. Donald Trump’s presidential victory, which the great U.S. media outlets refused to consider until the last second, demonstrated, on an absurd scale, the point to which they incompletely or partially represented reality. In fact, the press’s bad reputation largely precedes this president’s arrival at the White House. And yes, it’s worth asking on some days whether CNN and The New York Times aren’t confusing their role with that of an opposition party.

But on the whole, journalists who practice their profession in a democracy are professionals who take care to tell the world’s stories in the fairest and most accurate way possible. Nothing annoys a journalist more, both professionally and personally, than making a factual error.

But Trump does not criticize the media on these grounds. Instead, he accuses all who disagree with him of disseminating “fake news” and of being “the enemy of the people;” he is the man who, every day in his morning tweets, proves he is allergic to any sort of free debate and foolishly seeks only to impose one unique thought—his own. But “words have power, and none so much here in the United States as the words of the president,” said the Southern California News Group, one of some 200 American media groups that, on Thursday, signed editorials as part of a collective response to denounce the attacks that Trump has incessantly led against the media since he began his presidency over a 1 1/2 years ago, and to shed light on the risks this represents to the exercise of First Amendment rights.

The president’s thoughts are full of lies and half-truths, uttered at a pace unparalleled in the history of the U.S. presidency. In early September, The Washington Post (which did not join the protest editorial movement) began reporting an exponential growth in “false and misleading claims” made by Trump in recent months. The daily tally established the number of these falsehoods during the first year of his presidency at 2,140. In the last six months – on the cusp of the congressional midterm elections – this number has almost doubled to 4,229. As The New Yorker has reported, this means that Trump feels increasingly free to lead the White House as he sees fit and to “say and do what he wants when he wants to.” However, although he is a particularly unpopular president, the magazine reported that 80 percent of Republican voters remain faithful to him.

If we start from the principle that this is not a presidency like any other, and that this in fact represents a danger to democracy, the exceptional gesture made by these 200 media outlets, encompassing around 350 newspapers, was a necessary wake-up call. It is part of their future. Threatened by the growth of social networks, American newspapers, like everywhere else in the West, are fighting for their economic survival, and this economic bind affects the quality of information they convey. Are they preaching to the converted? Undoubtedly. Does this gesture crystallize Trump’s most vociferous militants against them? Surely. But the fact is that a rapprochement between the two sides isn’t coming. The collision will be head-on and is inevitable. The rise of the far left within the Democratic Party bears witness to this.

Defending the freedom of the press is a constant battle. To attack this freedom, as Trump does, is to take part in an anti-democratic logic that, following the worst-case scenario, will drive the exercise of free speech and dissident rights underground. In doing this, Trump’s behavior requires the media to be more rigorous than ever. Especially since this is part of a wider attempt to deconstruct freedoms and social progress – with respect to the environment, abortion rights, access to health care and the independence of the judiciary. What all these newspaper editorials just said needed to be said, and will need to be said again and again.