(Dobbs) “The collapse of values at the top has become untenable.”The media will do its duty. Trump and his government will do what they can to stop it.
These are tough times in the world of serious journalists. Tough times, challenging times, distressing times. Early this week, the Pentagon announced to the journalists who cover it that they no longer are welcome in the Pentagon press office. Do you see what it’s saying? The press is prohibited from the press office. The Pentagon’s excuse is that speechwriters for the defense secretary and others have been relocated there. So now, because they sometimes write about classified issues, it is “classified space.” Until the Trump administration moved in, journalists didn’t quite have the run of the place but were fairly free to roam the halls and sit with military officers and flush out their stories. When I covered the Pentagon for a short time, it worked for me. ABC News’s audience was the beneficiary of the long-standing policy of open doors. No harm was done. But earlier this year, Pete Hegseth’s contempt for the news media came full flower when he put a policy in place that required every journalist to have an escort in the building, and to have official permission to talk to anyone who had any official connection to the Pentagon. Eventually, some reporters who got on Hegseth’s bad side were even labeled as “security risks” and had their press passes taken away. What’s especially hypocritical is, the biggest security risk since the new administration took charge last year was Hegseth himself, after he sloppily divulged the actual timeline for an air attack against Yemen on a publicly available app. However, that didn’t turn out to be the biggest story of this week about journalists. A week ago at CBS News, editor-in-chief Bari Weiss— hired by the CEO of Paramount, which owns CBS and has curried Donald Trump’s favor to win approval for a major media merger— fired the executive producer of 60 Minutes and two of its seasoned correspondents. She didn’t give a reason, but evidently the fact that some of those she let go had been critical of her leadership seemed reason enough. Satirist Andy Borowitz wrote yesterday, “Bari Weiss Exits CBS to Run North Korean State Media.” It’s not nearly that bad, but it’s not all that good either. It wasn’t good enough for former CBS anchor and longtime 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley. At a Monday staff meeting to meet Nick Bilton, the new executive producer of the program who Weiss had just hired, Pelley gave his opinion that no change was required at a television program that is among the most popular in America. And he wasn’t polite about it. He said Bari Weiss was “murdering 60 Minutes” and told the new executive producer, who has no background in television journalism, that he had “slender” credentials for the job and would “never be welcome” at CBS News. Tuesday night he got fired for it. So much for free speech at CBS News, which once was the avatar of the cherished principle on which the American people depend. Pelley was impolite if not downright rude, but as I know from my own experience covering news and dealing with adversaries, sometimes that’s the attitude you need, and as Pelley sees it, the people trying to soften a hard-hitting news program like 60 Minutes are precisely that: adversaries, not crusaders. The man Pelley insulted said he “demonstrated that (he has) no interest in contributing to the future success of the show.” That’s more insulting than anything Pelley himself said. Scott Pelley and I covered some wars together, as competitors but not adversaries. He has put his life on the line for CBS. To accuse him of having “no interest in contributing to the future success of the show” shows just how shallow the toadies truly are who take their cues from the enmity of Donald Trump. As Pelley told The New York Times, “The collapse of values at the top has become untenable.” Which leads to the third story of the week. It was announced on Tuesday that the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, which was cut short in April by an armed man apparently intent on shooting the president, has been rescheduled for July 24th. The president of the association, CBS reporter Weijia Jiang, said in a statement, “We will not allow an act of violence to have the last word, especially during a year when we are reflecting on the 250th anniversary of America and everything we stand for.” But it’s not that simple. The purpose of the annual dinner, which Trump had never before attended, is to celebrate the First Amendment. That’s the one that guarantees freedom of the press. But before the April event, Trump had said he planned to “really rip” the media in, as he put it, the “most inappropriate speech ever made.’’ No surprise, since he almost routinely sues serious journalists who displease him and regularly attacks the media as “fake news” and has invoked the line used long before him by the likes of Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, and Mao Zedong, that the press is “the enemy of the people.” There was some hope that after the potentially fatal attempt against him in April, Trump might temper his temperament at the rescheduled dinner. But that was naive. There is no hope for Donald Trump. When the new date was announced, this nasty man said on social media, “I don’t know whether or not I will give the same rather nasty statements, at least as it concerns certain people, but we will soon find out.” Back in April, I was a signatory along with more than 500 serious journalists to a letter urging the Correspondents’ Association “to make a strong public statement at the dinner, including a condemnation of anyone who attempts to undermine freedom of the press.” Its core sentence is worth reading: “The collective weight of the administration’s actions— retaliatory access bans, coercive regulatory investigations, frivolous lawsuits against the press, defunding of public broadcasting, dismantling of international broadcasting, physical restrictions on journalists, personal verbal attacks on reporters, assaults on the media in official White House press releases and social media posts, the arrest of journalists, and the pardoning of those who committed violence against the press— represent the most systematic and comprehensive assault on freedom of the press by a sitting American president.” A strong public statement next month would have to be consistent with what Scott Pelley said: “The collapse of values at the top has become untenable.” In this case, it’s the collapse of values at the top of the United States government, which has demeaned, defunded, or even displaced journalists who don’t bend a knee to the president. To ignore that at the dinner in July would be an abrogation of the media’s mission. Share Here’s the takeaway from all this: if these are tough times for serious journalists, it means they are tough times for serious Americans, citizens serious enough to want information from their media and honesty from their president. The media will do its duty. Trump and his government will do what they can to stop it. |