Perusing the Opinion pages at the NY Times on a Saturday is interesting. What is being cast into the weekend news void? Conservative columnist Bret Stephens is having a Woke moment. Trump Will Have Blood on His Hands — His demonization of the news media won’t fall on deaf ears.
At the end of May, Stephens got this voice mail after writing a column defending the firing of Roseanne Barr for tweeting racist remarks.
“Hey Bret, what do you think? Do you think the pen is mightier than the sword, or that the AR is mightier than the pen?”
He continues: “I don’t carry an AR but once we start shooting you f—ers you aren’t going to pop off like you do now. You’re worthless, the press is the enemy of the United States people and, you know what, rather than me shoot you, I hope a Mexican and, even better yet, I hope a n— shoots you in the head, dead.”
He repeats the racial slur 10 times in a staccato rhythm, concluding with the send-off: “Have a nice day, n— lover.”
This was before Trump started openly calling the press “enemies of the people.” Further down in the column, Stephens observes:
“Donald Trump’s more sophisticated defenders have long since mastered the art of pretending that the only thing that matters with his presidency is what it does, not what he says.”
A man who makes his living with words should know how dangerous that idea is — and it’s finally sinking home now that it’s getting personal.
While Mr. Stephens is right to be concerned about Trump’s demonization of the press, what planet has he been living on? The Republican Party and the right wing have been attacking the press for decades. The basic premise of all right wing media is that the rest of the press is liberal, biased, and lies constantly. They’ve been putting that message out on a daily basis for years.
Stephens is one of those conservative columnists the Times uses to provide ‘balance’ on its editorial pages. If he really wants to provide balance on this, it’s past time for him to note that the Republican Party is fully on board with Trump’s attacks on the press and everything else Trump does. While he’s at it, maybe he should revisit the immigration atrocities, the Black Lives Matter movement, and those uppity NFL players. His opinions just might have changed.
I suggest Mr. Stephens start wearing a t-shirt that says “Press lives matter” and take a knee when the national anthem is played if he wants to get the full-on treatment as a target. They say a conservative is a liberal who got mugged. Well, sometimes a liberal is a conservative who didn’t think it could happen to him — until it did. Meanwhile, Thoughts & Prayers © Bret. Thoughts & Prayers ©.
As for the rest of the media who played the one-hand/other-hand false equivalence game, and amplified “But her emails” because that and giving Trump maximum air time was good for ratings, they should acknowledge their own role in setting themselves up for this.
NY Times Photographer Damon Winter has a column with heartbreaking photos: The Children at the Trump Rallies — What is it like to see young people exposed to so much anger? Heartbreaking, says a Times photographer.
He’d been traumatized covering Trump rallies during the 2016 campaign, seeing young children being taught to hate. He thought of his own children and at some level it hurt him to see this kind of abuse of trust, of parental love. Especially when it was being directed at him. And now...
As before, I was drawn to the children, but this time through the lens of 19 months of the Trump administration. The people in that arena supported the actions of a sitting president, not just the musings of a candidate. In that time, the anger I experienced on the trail had taken shape with real-world consequences. The chants of “Build the wall” in 2016 were realized in a haphazard zero-tolerance immigration policy that resulted in nearly 3,000 child separations in 2018.
Where were these stories then? Why weren’t we getting shown them at a time when it might have made a difference, before these same ‘loving’ parents put a man in the White House who is locking up children in cages? What editorial decisions kept them out of the news, and why? The history of these times is going to have to include the failure of the press to do its constitutional duty. Some of them still don’t get it.
The idea that we are supposed to understand the people who support Trump and sympathize with them has practically become a news story genre. The idea that civility should be the order of the day ignores the reality that these people are anything but civil — and haven’t been for a long time.
All that being said, let me take a moment to be fair to the press by acknowledging an inconvenient truth: a lot of people do not want to hear bad news. They want their beliefs reinforced, not challenged. They want “olds” not “news” as Lord Havelock Vetinari put it in “The Truth”.
Gail Collins is having a snark-fest with a column Building a Trump-Free Barbecue — Summer fun: Do you really want Paul Manafort on the grill? We need to recognize we are partially responsible for the press we have — but not completely.
The press was eager to finally bring down the Clintons in 2016 — a long-standing ambition. Could we start seeing the same level of enthusiasm directed at bringing down Trump and the Republican Party? When Sarah Huckabee Sanders refused to say that the press wasn’t the enemy of the people, the entire White House Press Corps should have gotten up and walked out. They are complicit in their own destruction — and ours. They need to do better.
But don’t we all?
RESIST.
