By Claude Salhani
In the first 72 hours since being sworn in as the 45th president of the United States, President Donald Trump and his administration have carried out a coordinated attack on the media, demonstrating “a clear disregard of the facts,” said a statement from the Paris-based media watchdog group, Reporters Without Borders (RSF).
Mr. Trump is irritated at the media because a number of media outlets disagree with many of his statements and with many of his actions. Mr. Trump does not like it when people disagree with him. Anyone who gets in his way will bare the wrath of “The Donald,” as former president Barak Obama used to refer to Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign.
“It is not the job of the press to provide public relations for the administration,” RSF said in a press statement released in the French capital earlier this week.
RSF reminded the Trump administration that the job of the press is not to provide public relations for the president. The relationship between Trump and his administration and the media got off to rocky start on day one -- Inauguration Day -- of his term in the White House, when the press and the administration differed over the size of the crowd attending Trump’s inauguration on the National Mall. Apparently, Trump was infuriated when some media outlets published pictures of his inauguration ceremony side-by-side with pictures of President Barak Obamas’ inauguration, four years ago. Clearly there appears to be far more people attending the previous event, a fact that upset the president.
Mr. Trump later declared that his inauguration crowd was “the best ever.” Trump later called the Park Police director and pressured him to issue a statement with revised figures. The US Park Police, who is responsible for the area on the National Mall, roughly a two-mile strip of land that runs from Capitol Hill to the Lincoln Memorial, used to issue crowd estimates, but has stopped doing do following a controversy over crowd numbers during the “Million Man March” when organizers claimed they had attracted far more than a million people while the Park Police estimated the crown at far less than a million. Since then the Park Police has stopped offering crowd estimates.
The size of the crowds at the president’s inauguration should not be matter of concern on the president’s first day in office. Yet there he was, tweeting away.
So infuriated with some of the press reports were some members of the new administration that Stephen Bannon, Trump’s Assistant to the President and chief strategist, told the media to “shut up.”
What makes a strong democracy? Remember the quote often wrongly attributed to Voltaire that states: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it?” Well, regardless of who actually said it, what is important here is the content of that phrase.
It is important for the current leadership in Washington to remember why the founding fathers of the United States of America came to the New World from England. Was it not, in part to get away from not being able to speak their minds or to practice their religion without fear of persecution?
So when a senior White House official tells the media to “shut up” there is something fundamentally worrisome and fundamentally wrong with this picture.
The strength of a democracy is precisely its diversity of ideas, the meeting of different minds and the sharing and molding of ideas form what is best for the people. The alternative can no longer be considered a democracy but takes on the shades of an autocracy.
The job of the press is not to shut up, quite the contrary. The job of the media in a democracy is to formulate independent opinions and to instigate a debate.
As Winston Churchill used to say, “democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others that have been tried.”
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Claude Salhani is a journalist and a political analyst specializing in terrorism and the Middle East. He is the author of the newly published novel, “Inauguration Day.”