This Week in Fascism: The Death of the Independent Free Press
Get ready for more glowing, gushing reporting of the convicted felon and his second administration’s criminal empire.
Get ready for more glowing, gushing reporting of the convicted felon and his second administration’s criminal empire.
The United States of America, the-once “shining city on the hill,” took several more steps toward fascism this week when the White House announced on Tuesday that it and it alone — not the White House Correspondents’ Corporation--will decide which press organizations and reporters will be admitted into the presidential press pool.
But fear not! Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt insists this is returning “power to the people.”
“Legacy outlets who have participated in the press pool for decades will still be allowed to join — fear not,” Leavitt pronounced from behind her almighty lectern. “We will also be offering the privilege to well-deserving outlets who have never been allowed to share in this awesome responsibility.”
“Offering the privilege to well-deserving outlets.” An “awesome responsibility.”
Translation: If you plan on asking tough questions, insist on honesty, and refuse to grovel before the dear leader’s feet, get ready to have your press pass revoked.
White House Correspondents Association head and Politico reporter Eugene Daniels blasted back:
In free countries, like the United States is, leaders don’t get to pick who covers them day in and day out.
Are we still a “free country”?
Without a free press, how can we be?
Leavitt’s message wasn’t intended for outlets of record like Politico and the New York Times, though; it was a shout-out to the far-right outlets previously on the conspiracy theory fringes now permitted seats once occupied by respectable journalists.
A White House reporter, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of repercussions, explained:
It’s surreal to watch these so-called new media people asking softball, ludicrous questions to Trump and Leavitt. I never thought I’d see plants in press briefings of the highest seat of American power.
Yup.
It’s where we are now.
One step closer to tin-pot dictatorship, like Russia — just what Vladimir Putin and his little sniveling sycophants and apologists in Congress, the right-wing hate- media, and the Oval Office are hoping for.
Susan Glasser, staff writer at The New Yorker, warned the seditionist White House is “on the way to establishing its own version of a Kremlin press pool, approved media only.”
There is a reason the framers of our Constitution named press, religious, and protest freedoms first.
They understood, having experienced the tyrannical hand of an absolute monarch, how vital to democracy freedom of expression without government censor, censure, or coersion is to keeping power in check. Without it, despotism thrives.
As the Virginia Declaration of Rights — from which the first few paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence comes — states:
That the freedom of the press is one of the greatest bulwarks of liberty and can never be restrained but by despotic governments.
That’s why despotic governments promptly seek to shut down press freedom. If is weren't important, it would be ignored.
We first learned this lesson as a new nation in 1798 during the presidency of John Adams. In “preparation” for possible war with France, Congress passed and Adams signed a group of laws known collectively as “the Alien and Sedition Acts”.
The National Archives explains:
These laws raised the residency requirements for citizenship from 5 to 14 years, authorized the president to deport “aliens,” and permitted their arrest, imprisonment, and deportation during wartime. The Sedition Act made it a crime for American citizens to “print, utter, or publish…any false, scandalous, and malicious writing” about the government.
Under these restrictions, President Adams, who had maligned the press with for its “tongues and pens of slander” and for their “profligacy, falsehood, and malignancy, in defaming our government,” had Benjamin Franklin’s grandson, Benjamin Franklin Bache, hauled off to jail for publishing a criticism of Adams calling the president “old, querulous, bald, blind, crippled, Toothless Adams.”
Vermont Congressman Matthew Lyon was confined to a prison cell in Vergennes, Vermont for calling Adams “pompous”. Lyons was reelected while incarcerated, and was released in time to cast his vote for Thomas Jefferson for president, who, as Adams’s vice president, was so appalled at the Sedition Acts, he retreated to his Monticello home for the remainder of his term, never speaking to Adams again until a few years before they died (on the same day).
Total, 24 newspaper printers, editors, and writers were convicted under this law, which expired the day before Thomas Jefferson took office. Jefferson then pardoned all those convicted.
Administrations have always tried to tamp down free speech in the interest of “national security”.
Another famous example is that of Eugene Debs, who was imprisoned after violating the Woodrow Wilson-era Espionage Act when he spoke out against America’s involvement in the first world war. Debs ran for president on the Socialist ticket five times, the final run, in 1920, from his cell.
In every conflict this country has encountered, a free press has been there to expose the lies, cover ups, and backpedaling. It isn’t perfect, but it’s necessary to maintain an informed electorate and the constitutionally limited democratic republic at the moment hanging on by its fingernails.
For those of us who have already moved to alternative news sources, this most recent power grab from the old adjudicated rapist currently residing at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue doesn’t come as surprise. But most of the public who claim to not have time to even know who their two US senators are, who proudly insist they “aren’t political,” will definitely be relegated to an even larger filter bubble, threatening the sacrosanct fourth estate the framers of our Constitution recognized was vital enough to be included in it.
There are already too many lies (let’s stop calling it “disinformation”!) on social media coming out of Russia and other countries that would love to see the United States collapse. There is already too much corporate ownership of the media.
The time to defend the free press — our freedom of speech — is now.