The link is to a story Vox broke yesterday about leaked drafts of executive orders for a ban on Muslims entering the country and a harsh crackdown on immigrants already here.
After reading through it I had to take a break. Couldn’t handle more of the malice, the unabated cruelty, pouring through the potholes. Watching my country drift towards autocracy (def. “a system of government by one person with absolute power”). I turned to Acorn TV to catch up on a British police procedural, ‘Suspects,’ a series that’s a little predictable in structure, but works for me; it’s tight, well-acted and, most crucially, absorbing. It did the trick, for about 2 1/2 hours.
Then it was back to the real/unreal world — MSNBC, etc. — seeing one poll finding that the majority of Americans thought his “America First” inauguration speech was just dandy, and another one that found a substantial number of Americans who think banning Muslims is also right-on.
I told my wife that for the first time maybe we should seriously think about maybe leaving the country. “I’m hearing a lot of people at work say the same thing,” she replied. A sign that I, a second-generation immigration was already turning my back on my country, I cheered when I saw the Mexican president’s “screw you” to Donald Trump and his notion that Mexico would pay for the wall. “Viva Mexico!” I tweeted. President Enrique Peña Nieto his since canceled his scheduled meeting with Trump next week, under pressure from an outraged citizenry. People power.
Inside the High Castle
Back in Washington D.C., meanwhile, “Four top @StateDept Mgmt officials all fired by Trump admin, part of effort to “clean house,” tweeted CNN’s national security correspondent Jim Sciutto. Watch for similar purges at the Voice of America, the $218 million radio and TV broadcaster to the world, where Trump’s minions are busily turning it into their master’s voice, at the EPA — soon to become the Federal Destruction Agency — and other agencies across the board.
I was just about to pivot to Trump’s alt-right consigliere, Steve Bannon and his growing influence in the White House when the New York Times flashed this across my screen: ‘President Trump’s strategist Stephen Bannon attacked the media as the “opposition” and said it should “keep its mouth shut”.
The Hill, the Capitol’s go-to publication, ran a story yesterday about “Bannon dipping into Breitbart News to staff the White House.The hires give Bannon more loyalists in Trump’s West Wing, and also raise Breitbart’s profile and power.” One of Bannon’s senior editors at Breitbart News is in line for “a likely spot” on the National Security Council, said The Hill, citing Business Insider.
The Breitbartization of the White House comes as no surprise to people at the conservative news site.” “I’m surprised it took this long,” one Breitbart reporter told The Hill. “There are a number of people on staff who clearly have resumes that would lend themselves to the administration. These two are ideologically in line with Bannon. They’re people he can trust. It makes sense.”
It makes double sense, notes The Hill as Breitbart News is set to launch in France, Italy and Germany, “where the outlet believes Brexit-style insurgencies could be on the cusp of developing.”
Breitbart has begun a hiring spree meant to capitalize on the forces that turned it into a juggernaut on the right. That means picking off reporters from more mainstream news outlets like John Carney, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who will edit the website’s business page.
Far from keeping its mouth shut, Breitbart’s hated opposition has been doing its job as the Fourth Estate, calling out Trump’s deluded fictions as “lies,” including in headlines. What impact it has remains to be seen, as will its ability to withstand the increasingly assaults launched by Bannon and other acolytes of a President of the United States who calls the press “among the most dishonest human beings on earth.”
A gathering storm
The Times ran an op-ed yesterday titled ‘Don’t Expect the First Amendment to Protect the Media’. “The truth is, legal protections for press freedom are far feebler than you may think. Even more worrisome, they have been weakening in recent years,” say the authors, law professors at the University of Utah and the University of Georgia. The First Amendment does not protect it from hostile attacks from the likes of Trump and Bannon, nor does it guarantee access to government sources and documents needed in the course of reporting.
There are some legal protections, but the press also relies on nonlegal safeguards. In the past, these have included the institutional media’s relative financial strength; the good will of the public; a mutually dependent relationship with government officials; the support of sympathetic judges; and political norms and traditions.
However “each of these pillars has recently been shaken,” the authors say, by economic decline, a fall-off in readership, an erosion of public trust (for whatever reason), and a less sympathetic judiciary, among other vulnerabilities. The authors might have added the fragmenting of the media, the Internet, and the power of fake news and its dispensers.
“Each of these press-freedom pillars weakens, the one remaining pillar must bear more than its share of the weight,” and “the one that President Trump now seems most keen to destroy” — tradition, precedent — that guarantee that members of the White House press corps have access to the workings of the executive branch.”
We cannot simply sit back and expect that the First Amendment will rush in to preserve the press, and with it our right to know. Like so much of our democracy, the freedom of the press is only as strong as we, the public, demand it to be.
As Bannon’s fusillade demonstrates, this warning could not come at a more critical moment. Political norms and traditions are a thing of the past.
