A very disturbing article, but a "must read". In my opinion however,
Donald Trump is not the most powerful man in the world. Donald Trump
is Carnival Pitchman, fronting for the American Corporate Empire's
Ruling Class. "come one, come all!" Donald Trump is just a loud
husckster. A big bloated bag of wind. His only power is the power
given him by the ACE.
But as I've already given my opinion regarding my belief that the
United States of America has undergone a quiet coup by the Pentagon,
Donald Trump's tyrade against the Evil Press is simply one more step
in completing the coup and closing the circle.
Carl Jarvis
On 8/17/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Donald Trump Is a Dangerous Demagogue. It's Time for a Crusading Press to
Fight Back.
By James Risen, The Intercept
17 August 2018
When Adolf Hitler came to power, after the Nazis had shut down all of
Germany's independent newspapers and magazines and ended press freedom in
the country, Hermann Ullstein, a member of a highly regarded German
publishing family, fled to New York and wrote a penetrating memoir of the
rise and fall of his family's media empire.
His father, Leopold Ullstein, a Jewish newspaper dealer, had founded
Ullstein Verlag, the family publishing house, which at its pre-Nazi peak
owned some of Germany's most important publications, including the
Vossische
Zeitung newspaper. But when Hitler stole their press holdings, Hermann
Ullstein and other family members fled, and by World War II, the Ullstein
presses were being used to print Das Reich, a newspaper created by Nazi
propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.
From his refuge in New York, Hermann Ullstein wrote critically of the
failure of the German press to confront Hitler more aggressively when it
still had a chance - before he came to power. In his 1943 book, Ullstein
chastised the mainstream press in Germany for being too cautious in the
pre-Nazi years, especially in comparison to the aggressive right-wing media
that was rising during the late 1920s and boosting Hitler's political
fortunes. He lamented the weak response of "the loyal press," his phrase
for the pre-Nazi mainstream press "whose efforts were devoted to democracy,
and whose failure was to a large extent due to mildness of language, to the
tired and cautious spirit in which they fought."
Hermann Ullstein's criticism of the mainstream press of the pre-Nazi era
would sound eerily familiar to anyone following the American media today as
it tries to confront Donald Trump. Trump has repeatedly castigated the
American press as "the enemy of the people" and has brought his political
supporters to such a crazed pitch that many of them now consider
journalists
to be traitors. Some of Trump's backers even seem to think that physical
attacks on reporters are acceptable.
Trump uses his Twitter account to maliciously attack individual reporters,
and journalists covering Trump's dark and fevered rallies are now being
forced to hire security personnel to protect themselves from the crowds.
Trump seeks to discredit the mainstream press at every turn, while granting
preferential access to news organizations that traffic in right-wing
propaganda and conspiracy theories.
He has pressured the Justice Department to launch a wide range of leak
investigations of the press, and has politicized that process to such an
extent that at least two of the first leak cases to be prosecuted by his
administration have involved stories related to whether Russia has meddled
in the American electoral system and whether the Trump campaign colluded
with the Russians to help Trump win the 2016 election.
Many in the American press today blanche at any comparisons between Trump
and Hitler or other autocrats, and warn against overreacting to Trump. They
also recoil at the notion that the press should go on a war-footing against
Trump and eschew old-style journalistic crusades. They fear that such a
confrontational approach will harm their credibility. Martin Baron,
executive editor of the Washington Post, coined a phrase that succinctly
captured this professional ethic - "We're not at war, we're at work."
To be sure, plenty of reporters are doing great work under enormous
pressure. Many news organizations continue to engage in aggressive
investigative reporting about Trump, and much of what we now know about
Trump's corruption and possible collusion with Moscow has come from the
press. But while that investigative digging is underway, Trump's daily
efforts to denigrate and discredit the press continue unabated, and his
subversive efforts to undermine the media have had an impact. A recent poll
showed that nearly nine out of 10 Republicans disapprove of the way the
media has covered Trump.
The press often seems uncertain on how to respond. The White House press
corps in particular seems determined to try to cover Trump as it has
previous presidents, employing the same American journalistic standards and
practices used in the past. Some press critics now believe that approach is
too passive in the face of Trump's malevolent approach.
"When the most powerful person in the world declares war on journalism, you
can respond in one of two ways," writes Dan Gillmor, co-founder of News
Co/Lab and professor of practice at Arizona State University's Walter
Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. "The first adds up to
surrender. I'm sorry to say that some of you appear to have done so, by
normalizing what is grossly abnormal and letting your enemies take
advantage
of the craft of journalism's inherent weaknesses."
It's time to break with those civil traditions, other critics have added.
"Journalists charged with covering him should suspend normal relations with
the presidency of Donald Trump, which is the most significant threat to an
informed public in the United States today," argues Jay Rosen, a journalism
professor at New York University.
Some counter that Trump is only following in the press-bashing pattern set
by Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, who both also used leak
investigations to target reporters. (Believe me, I know about that. Both
Bush and Obama came after me in a leak investigation that lasted seven
years.)
But it is a mistake to see Trump as just another White House occupant
following in a long tradition of presidential press-bashing. While the
present-day U.S. is not Weimar Germany, Trump is not Hitler, and his
incompetent administration has not come close to consolidating power in the
way the Nazis did, Trump is nonetheless a dangerous demagogue who deploys
some of the same tactics that Hitler did, and he has already gone further
to
attack the democratic institution of a free press than his predecessors
did.
He is seeking nothing less than the destruction of the legitimacy of the
American press.
As Hermann Ullstein warned, such dangerous threats to press freedom are
sometimes only taken seriously in hindsight. In 1964, the New York Times
echoed Ullstein, writing that his family had made one critical mistake.
"That was to believe that Adolf Hitler's early statements of anti-Semitism
were merely campaign oratory. They failed to turn the power of their papers
and magazines against the rising Hitler until it was too late."
Many in the American media believe that they are fighting back aggressively
already. And indeed, in response to Trump's attacks, hundreds of news
organizations are publishing editorials about press freedom today. But
that's not enough. The response to Trump by the American press is still too
tepid. Most American editors and reporters today disavow old-fashioned,
crusading journalism, in which a news organization or even a group of news
outlets throw all of their energy into an all-out assault on one story.
They
fear that crusades look partisan.
But crusading journalism is what is needed now. And there is a model to
follow from recent American history. In 1976, Don Bolles, an investigative
reporter with the Arizona Republic newspaper in Phoenix who had become
well-known for his coverage of the Mafia, was killed when his car blew up.
In response, investigative reporters from all over America poured into
Arizona to continue Bolles's reporting. In 1977, those reporters, working
through what became known in journalism as the Arizona Project, produced a
23-part series on corruption in Arizona.
Today, more than 40 years later, American journalists should come together
for a Trump Project.
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