Paying a big price

When the leader of one of the world’s most vibrant democracies threatens the media of his own country and says they will pay a “big price,” one should get worried. As a journalist, I see free speech and unfettered freedom of the press is a precursor to any vibrant democracy. Not so it seems in Trump’s USA.

It is an irony for us to see an American president going after the media and threatening them. But that does not come as a surprise. To give credit to Trump, his electoral campaign had to fight bitterly against a media biased against him from the very beginning.

For journalists today, particularly those in the US, the big question is how did they get it so wrong. Most had predicted a Hillary win. Instead, they got Trump. Part of the reason for Trump’s victory, say media analysts, was the proliferation of fake news, which riled people and made them vote for Trump. But that is only one explanation. There should be more.

Within a day of his being sworn in as 45th president of the United States, 70-year old Donald Trump was on the warpath against the media. In his inaugural speech he said that the battle against radical Islamic terrorism would be at the heart of his foreign policy. Would the media be the main target of his domestic policy?

Trump has accused the media of downplaying the turnout at his inauguration by focusing on empty spots on Washington’s National Mall, insisting against all evidence that he drew 1.5 million people. In his comments, Trump said that when he made his inaugural speech, he looked out at the field where the crowd looked like a million, million and a half people. The media instead showed a field where there was practically nobody standing there.

Local media reported that Washington city authorities do not provide official crowd counts but TV footage clearly showed the crowd did not in fact stretch all the way to the Washington Monument and aerial photos indicate that turnout on Friday was significantly smaller than during Barack Obama’s second inauguration, in 2013.

Significantly, Trump’s latest attack came during a visit to CIA headquarters on a fence-mending mission after his public rejection of the assessment by US intelligence agencies that Russia meddled to try to help him win the November election.

In his speech, Trump said “I have a running war with the media.” Vox News in a commentary said that “like much that Trump says, this isn’t quite true.” His war isn’t with the media. Trump lives off media attention and delights in press coverage. His war is with facts. And it’s there that his tactical skirmishes with the press begin to make sense. Delegitimising the media is important to Trump because delegitimising certain facts is important to Trump. This is scary.

The question of course is, what next. Sitting far away in insignificant Pakistan, one wonders whether the war that the US president has started with the media will blow its winds in this direction. Already, his election has raised hopes for right-wing and far-right elements. They draw strength from his election to the world’s most powerful position.

Already a well of protest has started against the new president.  More than 1 million people gathered in Washington and in cities around the country and the world over the weekend to mount a roaring rejoinder to the inauguration. What started as a Facebook post by a Hawaii retiree became an unprecedented international rebuke of a new president that packed cities large and small — from London to Los Angeles, Paris to Park City, Utah, Miami to Melbourne, Australia.

Many in the nation’s capital and other cities said they were inspired to join because of Trump’s divisive campaign and his disparagement of women, minorities and immigrants.

In signs and shouts, they mocked what they characterised as Trump’s lewd language and sexist demeanor. But Trump and his administration have ignored the public sentiments against their administration.

Coming back to the role of the media, will we see the American media finally bowing down to Trump’s onslaught? As the new administration starts fully functioning, possibly the biggest war for the freedom of the press would well be in the US. Interesting times ahead.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 23^rd, 2017.

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