Horowitz: Enemy of the People

Tuesday, February 21, 2017

Rob Horowitz, GoLocalWorcester MINDSETTER™

Rob Horowitz

With a job approval rating dipping below 40% in highly regarded national polls, such as PEW and Gallup-the worst rating by far of any recent President at this early point in their term--- and facing a series of self-inflicted wounds that taken together communicate rank incompetence, President Trump in predictable fashion is not looking in the mirror Instead, in shoot the messenger fashion he is stepping up his war with the media, using language usually only uttered by dictators and autocrats.

Following up on his 82 minute Thursday media conference, in which he punctuated his meandering and often untruthful answers with a combination of general attacks on media and unbecoming rudeness to individual reporters when he didn’t like a question, Trump went even further on Friday, labeling the media the “enemy of the people." Trump tweeted:” The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!”

This is the language of autocrats and dictators, not elected leaders in a democracy. As Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame said in response, "Donald Trumpis demonstrating an authoritarian attitude and inclination that shows no understanding of the role of the free press."

Senator John McCain(R-AZ) echoed Bernstein’s observation when asked about the president’s attacks on the media on Meet the Press this past Sunday: “If you want to preserve — I'm very serious now — if you want to preserve democracy as we know it, you have to have a free and many times adversarial press," McCain said. "And without it, I am afraid that we would lose so much of our individual liberties over time. That's how dictators get started."

President Trump's blasting the media for dishonest reporting and so-called “fake news’ is particularly ironic and especially unconvincing, given that he is perhaps the most unreliable source of accurate information of any one who has ever held the Oval Office, including Richard Nixon. As noted historian Doug Brinkley said about then candidate Trump, “In American history, we’ve never had a major presidential candidate who fabricated facts with the regularity of Donald Trump, He just simply makes up things.” And assuming the Presidency has not curbed Trump’s penchant for falsehoods as he has already used the bully pulpit to insist that he really won the popular vote because millions of votes were cast by illegal immigrants for Hillary Clinton, talk about a historic electoral college landslide that did not happen, and distort crime statistics beyond any resemblance to reality, to name just a few recent examples.

In a lecture delivered in honor of Daniel Pearl last week, conservative Wall Street Journal columnist Brett Stephens remarked, “Ideologically, the president is trying to depose so-called mainstream media in favor of the media he likes — Breitbart News and the rest. Another way of making this point is to say that he’s trying to substitute news for propaganda, information for boosterism.”

In the same lecture, Stephens argued that the ascent of Trump makes truth-seeking, which he views as the fundamental task of journalism even more essential to the functioning of of our democracy:. "And we honor the responsibility to separate truth from falsehood, which is never more important than when powerful people insist that falsehoods are truths, or that there is no such thing as truth to begin with."

Trump’s reckless attacks on the media are at bottom a brazen attempt to substitute his ‘alternative reality’ for inconvenient facts and to shift blame for the nearly disastrous beginning of his Presidency to an unpopular media. Thanks to courageous and good journalists and at least some Republican elected officials who are speaking out, along with the usual good judgment and discernment of the American people, a substantial majority of whom already believe Trump is dishonest, it is a strategy that will fail .

Rob Horowitz is a strategic and communications consultant who provides general consulting, public relations, direct mail services and polling for national and state issue organizations, various non-profits and elected officials and candidates. He is an Adjunct Professor of Political Science at the University of Rhode Island

Horowitz: Enemy of the People

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