Trump is leaving press freedom in tatters. Biden can take these bold steps to repair the damage.
Sunday , 06 December 2020
Officials with an autocratic bent around the globe snatched up the idea to mock the press or to deny ugly truths. By late 2017, for instance, a state official in Myanmar was using the term to deny not only the shameful persecution of a Muslim minority group, but that population’s very existence: “There is no such thing as Rohingya. It is fake news.”
And here in the United States, the “fake news” slam has been yelled at local TV reporters trying to cover a protest and deployed to diminish newspaper reporters who have uncovered political wrongdoing.
From Trump’s point of view, this toxic cynicism amounts to mission accomplished. The entire point of his disparagement — as when he called journalists “scum” or “the enemy of the people” — was preemptive self-protection, as he admitted shortly before the 2016 election, according to CBS’s Lesley Stahl: “ ‘I do it to discredit you all and demean you all, so when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you.’ ”
Now with a new administration coming into power next month, there may be a temptation to shrug off all this damage. To say, in effect, “Well, that’s over — let’s get back to normal.”
But that won’t be nearly enough. The culture isn’t going to repair itself just because an outrageous president has left office.
“The Biden administration needs to get out there quickly and clearly communicate that it stands for press freedom,” Joel Simon, executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, told me. The task, as he put it in a CPJ white paper, “is urgent, critical and demanding.”
Trump’s rhetoric has had frightening real-world consequences. A record number of journalists around the world were imprisoned over the past four years, some penalized for publishing “false news” as a result of new laws to punish reporting.
And many of us remember all too clearly that the Trump administration enabled the Saudi regime’s coverup of the 2018 murder of Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi, protecting Mohammed bin Salman from accountability. Trump was eager to preserve his relationship with an ally, despite the CIA’s conclusion that the crown prince had ordered the assassination.
The record is downright awful.
So what can Biden do, other than act more like a normal president?
Simon argues that the new president should make a major press-freedom speech, soon after taking office, that would place this issue “in the broader context of support for democracy, human rights, and political freedom.”