Tag Archives: The First Amendment

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Fake News?

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It’s disheartening to hear a president use “fake news” to dismiss the very best of American journalism.

It’s the President’s favorite theme.  If the phrase had a history prior to his administration, “fake news” has been reborn as the mantra of the Trump insurgency.

         A worrisome sign of  Trump’s legacy

Anyone who has been paying attention knows that the President uses the term to mean news coverage he does not find to his liking. When he took that famous escalator ride to the lobby of Trump Tower to announce his candidacy several years ago he must not have understood that his words and checkered business would be under intense scrutiny.

Trump’s frustration with the news media is hardly unique. Most presidents and many mayors and governors have gone through rocky relationships with the Fourth Estate.  At the same time, Americans understand that good journalism is sometimes going to make the powerful uncomfortable.  Witness the sentimental heroics displayed in films like The Post (2017), All the President’s Men (1976), Frost/Nixon (2008) and Good Night and Good Luck (2005).

A reasonable description of this moment in our national politics is that, indeed, the American leader is getting terrible press.  No doubt about it.  He and his administration are at the center of a cable news cycle intensely focused on miscues and misdeeds. Evidence of malfeasance is also the subject of most of the negative coverage in the legacy print news media, including the New York Times and Washington Post, and in public policy publications like The Atlantic, The New Republic and, increasingly, The New Yorker. If that were not bad enough for the West Wing, reports from conservative outlets are only marginally more positive, with the important exception of Fox News. The Wall Street Journal and The Weekly Standard are far from positive.  In addition, important conservative journalists like Max Boot, George Will and Bill Kristol are not fans.  Even Tucker Carlson is wavering.

The term has become its own reality, obliterating distinctions between rigorous journalism and ill-considered rants.

Reality television and social media have proven to be bad models for the President. Anyone with a knowledge of American civil life will understand that “news” can take many forms and be shaped from a variety of perspectives.  Phoney journalism has a long history in supermarket tabloids and reality shows not known for treating news gathering as a serious profession.  And, of course, internet sites and social media largely ignore the rigors of traditional reporting. Most websites do little more aggregate stories from other sources, while issuing polemics to like-minded partisans. Indeed, there’s enough fake news around for everybody to lament.

Even so, it is disheartening to see a president dismiss the very best of American journalism from our legacy media.  Among his followers, at least, this bogus indictment has the effect of undermining a cornerstone institution in American life. “Fake news” has become its own reality, obliterating distinctions between rigorous reporting and ill-considered rants. The phrase has also become a poison in the American body politic, slowly infecting every policy decision and utterance.

What is traditionally celebrated by a President now exists under a cloud of wild allegations.

It seems like Trump or his instructors at the University of Pennsylvania badly missed the mark many years ago. One wonders if a Wharton degree includes courses in American history and politics. How could he have missed the lessons of Jefferson, Franklin, Oliver Wendell Holmes and so many other defenders of the free press in an open society?  Why is the language of human rights and press freedom hardly visible even at the margins of his limited lexicon?

Some of us occasionally have to pinch ourselves to realize that we are witnessing the use of the nation’s highest office to persecute a core institution of civil society. Among other things, Trump’s relentless attacks mimic old Soviet habits of fueling distrust for any sources not under the thumb of the state. Rather than celebrating a core value of the great American experiment, this administration seems intent on discrediting it.

In Praise of Some (Polite) Hell-Raising

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Wall at the Newseum, Washington, D. C.
Front Wall at the Newseum, Washington, D. C.

The First Amendment is the best part of our flawed constitution. It’s also an essential license needed to secure the discussion that every society needs in order to renew itself.

I don’t share the unqualified enthusiasm that others express for the timeless relevance of our Constitution.  It’s enumeration of congressional and presidential powers is badly out of sync with our political times. And as a roadmap for a republic, it retains some of the offenses to the idea of direct democracy that were built in its earlier iterations. For example, Article One enshrines the fact that states like Rhode Island and California will have the same levels of representation in the Senate.  Irrespective of population size, all states get two Senators. But in terms of modern ideas of direct proportionality, California should have at least 35 more members in that body than the lovely but minuscule Ocean State.

In addition, the elaborate checks and balances the founders wanted as a remedies against warring political “factions” have produced just the reverse.  For many reasons gridlock is now structured into the system. The young adults I teach may represent the first American generation to never see the kind of Congressional leadership that was capable of partnering with a President to effectively govern. Examples of impressive Senate leadership–Johnson, Fulbright, Baker, among others–come from the not-so-recent past. Little wonder that for my students the body politic barely has a pulse.

What saves our Constitution is mostly its liberalizing Amendments, with some (The First, Thirteenth and Nineteenth) much better than others (The Second).

One could argue with some oversimplicity that, along with the idea of the national parks, the best idea we have given to ourselves and the world is The First Amendment. Its wording is refreshingly simple and free from a long list of exemptions. The Founders never gave the world a better model for freedom than this short and unambiguous paragraph.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

This is a good time to celebrate the Amendment, which has most recently given aggrieved citizens in Ferguson Missouri the right to march and be heard. Members of the community knew they had that right, and so far many–though not all–have exercised it reasonably. As in Ferguson, the challenge is to restrain the natural but sometimes misplaced interest by law enforcement officials to rein in crowds with uncertain intentions.

Sometimes the Amendment is used to justify vast and uneven distributions of media power, as in the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United vs. the F.C.C. ruling. The decision essentially the use of money in a campaign as a form of speech. Even constitutional lawyer Floyd Abrams, who inexplicably likes the ruling, concedes that the court’s obliteration of legal limits on campaign spending will give the wealthy vastly greater access to America’s voters.

I think Abrams is wrong to accept the court’s logic. Who knew the Justices could so blithely misread the Amendment as a franchise to the wealthy to dominate campaigns? So far most corporations have been more or less circumspect about funding the “superpacs” the decision allows.  But we’ll be lucky if our democracy survives the tsunami of campaign cash that will come to favored candidates from trade and ideological groups.

All the more reason, perhaps, to raise a little hell as invited by The First Amendment.  We are free to rally, march, write, publish, blog, carry signs, hold meeting and vigils, criticize, seek out lawmakers, pray and meet with who we please.

Of course, anything like throwing explosives at party-goers should not be a protected. That bit of misplaced hell-raising is part of my family’s lore. Many years ago my uncle supposedly made his way into Denver from the family mine in the nearby mountains to register his frustration over the slight of not being invited to a party.  He scattered the crowd quickly by tossing a lit dynamite starter on to the dance floor at a downtown country club. In his mind he was perhaps just using the tools for the family trade to register his objections.  But “speech” it wasn’t. I’m proud to report that he later redeemed himself as a prodigy geologist at The Colorado School of Mines, moving on just before he died  to help Japan set up its own Bureau of Mines.

But the point remains. The First Amendment is the best instrument for a vigorous civil society in an otherwise flawed constitution. It’s also an essential license needed to secure the right of discussion that every society needs in order to renew itself.

Comments: woodward@tcnj.edu