It is interesting to watch some of the reactions to a comment by President Trump that the liberal press is the enemy of the people of the United States.
I would interject that I’ve heard that same opinion about the press being the enemy of the United States for many decades, so Trump didn’t originate the comment. Is the comment true? Let’s look at some of the issues.
The debate about the press tends to resolve to two conflicting representations of what the press’ raison d’etre is. On the one hand, the press loudly touts the idea that without it, the public wouldn’t hear the objective news. On the other hand, the press often self-importantly touts the idea that its job is to “shape public opinion” by the way it reports the news.
Let’s face it, if the news is being skewed or selectively edited to “shape public opinion,” it is not objective news. A very recent comment by Matt Pearce of the Los Angeles Times proclaims, “Journalism is activism in its most basic form. The entire basis for its ethical practice is the idea that a democracy requires an informed citizenry in order to function well. Choosing what you want people to know is a form of activism, even if it’s not the march-and-protest kind.”
In the 1930s, Walter Duranty, a reporter for The New York Times, deliberately did not report the starvation of 5 million Ukrainians because Duranty was a supporter of communism, as was the Times.
In the 1970s, syndicated columnist William Safire wrote a number of columns about how the press was mostly pro-Democrat and anti-Republican. One famous column mused about what would have happened if John Kennedy’s name had been Nixon because so many of the illicit things that Kennedy did were simply not reported, but Nixon was constantly savaged. Go back and look, as another example, at how the liberal press tried to suppress much of the negative coverage about Ted Kennedy’s involvement in the 1969 death of Mary Jo Kopechne. Even some members of the press were embarrassed at the bogus coverage of Ted Kennedy.
I never cared for Nixon, but the press campaign against him, while avoiding any negative coverage of a Democratic president, reminds me very much of the current liberal press campaign to unseat the sitting president, Donald Trump. I’m not a Trump fan, either, but the nation needs to sit up and tell the press that their job is to report objective news, not attempt to sway elections and public sentiment ... i.e., “shape public opinion.” Disappointing Clinton-Trump post-election news was that the liberal media and many reporters had journalistically campaigned for Hillary Clinton, yet this important news was smothered rapidly by the leftist press.
The local news by The Durango Herald has a very leftward tilt to it, as many people have noted over the years. Environmental news is heavily reported, but almost exclusively from a leftist point of view. According to the Herald, the EPA under Gina McCarthy was good; the EPA under Scott Pruitt is bad. Shoddy and unproven science used to make laws under McCarthy was simply not reported; Pruitt’s reversal of questionably-founded rules is openly deplored, even if it was legally correct. It’s been recently revealed that Russia actively promotes pro-leftist environmental activism in the U.S., also.
In terms of immigration, the Herald coverage is openly on the side of illegal immigrants, but the generic term “immigrants” is printed to mask the illegality involved.
Illegal immigrants comprise about 7 percent of the population of the United States, but the recently released report from the U.S. Sentencing Commission shows that illegal immigrants account for 22 percent of all federal murder convictions, 18 percent of fraud convictions, 33 percent of money-laundering convictions, 29 percent of drug-trafficking convictions and 72 percent of convictions for drug possessions. Given that many citizens of the U.S. are victims of these crimes, where is the concern for U.S. citizens by the liberal media?
Is the liberal press the enemy of the people for not reporting objective news to the citizenry? You decide.
Mike Sigman, of Durango, is a retired businessman with an engineering background. Reach him at mikesigman@earthlink.net.
