Heading into this Labor Day weekend, it has been yet another turbulent few days for Donald Trump, whether or not he would admit it.

The effects of a rapidly-intensifying Russia probe were exacerbated by the death of Senator John McCain and a public outpouring of affection and respect the like of which the president knows well would probably never be accorded to him – not to mention the measured but pointed rebukes within the remarkable eulogies at the National Cathedral.

As the Mueller investigation builds to what appears its inevitable crescendo, perhaps in danger of being lost in all the noise is that a 68-year-old man was arrested and charged on Thursday with threatening to kill “every f*cking one” of the reporters at the Boston Globe. The man had allegedly called the paper with threats several times, both before and after the Globe led a national campaign by hundreds of local papers across the country pushing back against what has become Trump’s provocative definition of the press as the “enemy of the people”.

Outside the courthouse, the accused man echoed the inflammatory slogan before saying that America had been “saved” when Donald J. Trump was elected.

John McLaughlin, a former senior CIA official under presidents Clinton and Bush 43, tweeted that the language constituted an “incitement to violence, traceable directly to presidential rhetoric,” and warned that “only he (Trump) can stop it.”

It has been just a matter of weeks since five staffers were gunned down in the newsroom of the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Maryland; a shocking and tragic event that emphasized how vulnerable journalists can be as they attempt to carry out a function most people thankfully still believe is vital to the democratic process.

Yet on the evening of the charges in the Boston case, Trump himself repeated his familiar mantra in a tweet and also at yet another campaign-style rally in Indiana where, in perfect meta-representation, one of his volunteers was photographed blocking a camera from capturing an image of a protester. The president also used that rally to bolster his attack on his latest target – the technology giants that he has accused of bias in search results for news stories about him.

Of course, White House displeasure with their treatment by the press is nothing new, and Spiro Agnew’s “nattering nabobs of negativism” as an insult seems positively quaint today. But for Trump, the fact that these sorts of attacks have been intensifying is indicative of a deeply-held sense of unfairness – some may say strategic paranoia – among the president and his supporters that spreads across both new and old media, however news outlets reach their audiences.

The latest State of the News Media study by Pew Research showed that the gap is shrinking between the numbers who primarily get their news from online sources and from television (traditionally Americans’ go-to news source). Just two years ago, it was 57%-38% in favour of television; now that is just 50%-43%. Interestingly, Pew says that recent growth in mobile news is being driven by the oldest age groups.

Google, by the way, rejected the president’s claims, saying search is “not used to set a political agenda” and that results are never ranked to “manipulate political sentiment.” Executives from Google, as well as from Facebook and Twitter, are due to testify again before Congress this week on how the platforms are gearing up for coverage of November’s midterm elections.

This week is set to be dominated, though, by the start of the confirmation hearings for Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, despite objections by Democrats about access to documents and even the legitimacy of the appointment, given the president’s potential legal jeopardy. Whatever their strategy on the hearings turns out to be, the Democrats have been keeping a low media profile in their individual meetings with Kavanaugh.

It seems all too often these days that every aspect of civic discourse suffers from the political prism through which it’s viewed. And what you might think would be a solution to that – the idea of exposing your news and social media consumption to the other echo chamber – might turn out to make things worse, according to a study by sociologists at Duke University, reported in the Los Angeles Times.

“Americans are deeply divided on controversial issues such as inequality, gun control, and immigration,” the study’s authors wrote. “Partisan divisions not only impede compromise in the design and implementation of social policies but also have far-reaching consequences for the effective function of democracy more broadly.”

 

Trust and press freedom

An Ipsos poll last month found that while a reassuringly large majority (85%) of respondents agreed that freedom of the press is essential to US democracy, more than a quarter – and more than 40% of self-identified Republicans – believe the president should have the authority to shut down media outlets engaged in ‘bad behaviour’ (without any specifics on how such “behaviour” might be defined).

The poll also illustrated distinctive splits along partisan lines; for example, 79% of Republicans – but only 11% of Democrats – believe that the “mainstream media treats President Trump unfairly.”

And the effect of that in the current environment is that when a genuinely remarkable news day occurs – such as when the president’s lawyer Michael Cohen entered a guilty plea literally at the same moment as his former campaign manager Paul Manafort was being convicted – it becomes relatively easy on the back of a relentless anti-media message to convince supporters that what they’re seeing is either the biased concoction of the ‘deep state’, or that it simply doesn’t matter.

Generally, the Ipsos results showed overall trust in the press has continued to decline from its high in the late 1970s. But perhaps all is not lost: there was some good news on the trust front – specifically for local journalists – in another survey by Poynter. It found that “76% of Americans across the political spectrum have ‘a great deal’ or ‘a fair amount’ of trust in their local television news, and 73% have confidence in local newspapers. That contrasts with 55% trust in national network news, 59% in national newspapers and 47% in online-only news outlets.”

Yet despite such encouraging findings, the economic picture for local news remains fraught, and as the Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan recently wrote, the decline of local newspapers makes it harder for citizens to have an agreed-upon set of facts to argue about.

Even the nature of coverage itself is under discussion. BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith wrote an interesting piece the other day entitled “I helped create insider political journalism. Now it’s time for it to go away.” In it, he writes:

“I was reporting true facts about things that happened, for an audience who cared.

“That tradition had deep and American roots: In the ruthless scoop-mongering of Jack Anderson; in the trade coverage of the growing industry of politics; in the rich narrative tradition of politics-as-psychodrama, perfected by Richard Ben Cramer. At its best it was genuinely revelatory, as my old boss John Harris argues, the intense crucible of a political campaign revealing who the candidates really are.

“That journalism was also constructed for an era during which, as Charles Krauthammer used to say, American politics and governance were played between the 40-yard lines of bipartisan consensus on free markets, light regulation, a relatively open immigration policy whose cruelties went largely undiscussed, and hawkish foreign policy. In that context, it was perhaps not totally unreasonable to see players in blue and red shirts — particularly for the relatively small audience who consumed the papers, and then blogs, of the era…

“The focus of the American story in 2018 is not political tactics and personalities. New outlets, including BuzzFeed News, have been moving away from the conventions of 2000s insider reporting for years.”

 

Global impact              

But just as Americans may be increasingly and in some cases irreparably divided along partisan political lines in their attitudes to the media, President Trump’s repeated definition of coverage he doesn’t like as “fake news” has been widely adopted by politicians around the world who wish to disparage or discredit opposition voices; a point highlighted by New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger following a contentious meeting with the president which discussed threats against journalism at home and abroad.

And that sort of rhetoric has, according to media monitoring group Reporters Without Borders, had an impact on how journalists go about their jobs.

This year’s Index of Press Freedom describes a “climate of hatred” towards the press that is becoming steadily more visible, with many democratically-elected leaders portraying the media as an adversary.

The index, which measures factors including media pluralism and independence as well as abuses and violence against journalists, puts Norway at the top of its ranking of 180 countries for the second consecutive year, with North Korea again at the bottom. Turkey (157), Egypt (161) and Saudi Arabia (169) have fallen year-on-year, as have the Philippines (133) and India (138).

Myanmar, just which last night announced the jailing for seven years of two Reuters journalists who had been accused of violating state secrets laws while they were investigating violence against the Rohingya population, is ranked 137th, a fall of six places from last year.

Russia is ranked 148th and China 176th, both unchanged on the previous index.

Among English-speaking nations, New Zealand is 8th, Ireland 16th, Canada 18th, Australia 19th, South Africa 28th and the UK 40th. Under Donald Trump, the United States – as it moves into a new normal for the role of its press and how it is consumed – has fallen to 45th, just ahead of Italy and just behind Romania.

 

Also published on Medium.