President Trump has branded the "fake news" media the enemy of the people. Nearly a third of Americans agree, as do most Republicans, two alarming new polls found.
Today, the Star-Ledger editorial board joins more than 300 newspapers across the nation to respond.
Freedom of the press is not a God-given right. It is being degraded all over the globe, as autocrats use the power of the state to tightly muzzle independent journalists.
Times publisher, Trump meet to discuss anti-media rhetoric
At least 21 reporters in six countries have been jailed for "fake news," vaguely defined as any news the government considers a threat.
To justify these crackdowns, despots can now parrot the "leader of the free world."
Philippine strongman Rodrigo Duterte banned critical reporters from his events because he was tired of their "fake news." A Myanmar official dismissed the ongoing massacre of the Rohingya Muslim minority the same way: "There is no such thing as Rohingya," he said. "It is fake news."
This phrase once meant exactly what it sounds like: false stories, deliberately posing as news, spread by Twitter bots. Now it's any news that the great leader doesn't like.
Even many Americans support a Stalinesque use of government power to single out political opponents or stifle criticism. Almost a third believe the news media is "the enemy of the people," according to a new Ipsos poll - a phrase most widely used by Stalin.
A majority of Republicans think the press is the "enemy of the people," rather than "an important part of democracy," as our founding fathers believed, a Quinnipiac poll found. And nearly half of conservatives think the president should be able to shut down the press, they told Ipsos.
No doubt about it: If Trump could shut down his critics, he would. He's mused about loosening libel laws and suspending NBC's license. "It's frankly disgusting the way the press is able to write whatever they want to write," he said.
Yet imagine, for a moment, if they couldn't. What if we knew nothing about the conclusion of intelligence experts that Russia meddled in our election, and heard only that it was some guy from Jersey?
Here in our state, who would call out the double-dippers gaming our pension system, or a guy like David Samson, who extorted United Airlines for the "chairman's flight"? Who would wonder why a bridge got shut down in Fort Lee?
A police chief could retire with an obscene payout for unused sick days, with nary a peep. Think property taxes are out of control now? Consider what they'd be like if the press weren't watching.
In his famous opinion vindicating the decision to publish the Pentagon papers, Justice Hugo Black wrote, "The press was to serve the governed, not the governors."
But would Trump have wanted them published?
Fox News, the most-watched cable network, belies the notion that mainstream media doesn't include conservatives. Much of the hostility of the right toward the press actually originates elsewhere: Stories in which the press reports what someone says about Trump, and he blames the media.
After his debacle in Helsinki with Vladimir Putin, Trump got pummeled by his own party. But he made it sound like it was the press that was attacking him, simply by reporting what his critics said.
His fans are happy to blame the messenger. Incredibly, 39 percent of conservatives say negative news stories about politicians are always "fake news," even if they are accurate, a poll by the Knight Foundation and Gallup found. What are we to make of this?
Like Putin, or Stalin, Trump knows he doesn't need to convince his base that everything he says is true; just that everybody else is a liar, including the press that fact-checks him. Because when people believe that the real truth is unknowable, they grow cynical, and prefer to tune out and believe no one.
And so we have "the enemy of the people," a phrase straight out of George Orwell's dark imagination. But the real enemy of the people is never a free press, which holds the powerful accountable. It is a government that wants to be the sole arbiter of truth.
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