From his first campaign for the presidency to today’s run-up to his second term, Donald Trump has made no secret of his antagonism toward the press. He has vilified the media as “fake news” and “the enemy of the people” and filed endless lawsuits, most recently against ABC News.
“ABC News should never have caved,” wrote Margaret Sullivan, the columnist and former public ombudsman at The New York Times and The Washington Post. Like many others, Sullivan criticizes ABC’s decision to give Trump $16 million and an apology to settle his defamation suit, arguing that ABC did not libel Trump.
Sullivan quoted Yale historian Timothy Snyder’s book On Tyranny, which is based on Snyder’s decades of studying authoritarianism in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. The first lesson for resisting authoritarianism, Snyder writes, is, “Do not obey in advance.” Doing so “is teaching power what it can do.”
Trump has made no secret of what he’d like to do. In addition to ABC News, he has sued CBS News and the Des Moines Register and, most ludicrously, threatened to sue the Pulitzer Prize board. He has called for jailing journalists and stripping licenses from broadcasters whose reporting he doesn’t like.
The point of these SLAPP lawsuits is not to win — to do so, Trump would have to prove that a news organization’s reporting was intentionally inaccurate. The point, as Trump himself admitted to 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl in 2016, is to intimidate the media and de-legitimize its reporting in the eyes of the public. “I do it to discredit you all and demean you all so when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you,” Stahl quoted Trump telling her.
That’s not how democracy — and its necessary sentinel, a free press — are supposed to work. The press is the only institution the US Constitution’s Bill of Rights explicitly singles out for protection. As American statesman and founding father James Madison wrote, “a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power that knowledge gives.” That requires a press that is free to describe what government officials are actually doing, not merely what they claim to be doing.
It’s especially crucial that governments are not allowed to control what the public believes is true about climate change. In Trump’s rhetorical version of reality, climate change does not exist, so there’s no need to stop burning fossil fuels. In truth, as scientists have long warned, humanity’s planetary house is on fire, rapidly phasing out fossil fuels is imperative if we’re to avert utter catastrophe, and we have all the technologies needed to pursue a safer course. If the public is not made aware of these facts by a free press, people cannot act to protect themselves and their communities.
What Trump is attacking “is the very idea of journalism … the very act of telling the truth about him,” New Republic staff writer Greg Sargent said. Telling the truth about not just Trump but all public officials is a core mission of journalism. Now, the future of both democracy and a livable planet depend on it.
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Noteworthy Stories
Cyclone in Mayotte. Cyclone Chido made landfall Saturday in Mayotte, likely killing several thousand people and flattening much of the archipelago’s infrastructure. Super-charged by warmer-than-average Indian Ocean waters, the cyclone was the strongest to hit the area since 1934, the Guardian reports, devastating the territory’s 320,000 inhabitants, many of whom live in makeshift housing. By Danny Aeberhard and Tom Bennett for BBC News…
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Air pollution and fertility. Exposure to air pollution could be lowering the chances of egg survival and fertilization in IVF procedures, according to a new Emory University study. Using air pollution data from the Environmental Protection Agency, researchers concluded that individual pollutants can negatively impact both egg and sperm donor contributions, a finding with potentially major implications in the U.S., where nearly 40% of the population lives in areas with unhealthy air. By Jessica Kutz for the 19th News…
Jobs, Etc.
ProPublica is seeking a Reporter, Climate (New York, N.Y.). Wired is hiring a Senior Writer, Climate (New York, N.Y.). Hell Gate is recruiting a Writer-Editor (New York, N.Y.). Grist is seeking a Climate News Fellow (remote).
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