Tag: freedom of the press
Danziger: An Enemy Of  The Press

Danziger: An Enemy Of The Press

Jeff Danziger lives in New York City. He is represented by CWS Syndicate and the Washington Post Writers Group. He is the recipient of the Herblock Prize and the Thomas Nast (Landau) Prize. He served in the US Army in Vietnam and was awarded the Bronze Star and the Air Medal. He has published eleven books of cartoons and one novel. Visit him at DanzigerCartoons.com.

Danziger: Shoot First, Ignore Questions Later

Danziger: Shoot First, Ignore Questions Later

Jeff Danziger lives in New York City. He is represented by CWS Syndicate and the Washington Post Writers Group. He is the recipient of the Herblock Prize and the Thomas Nast (Landau) Prize. He served in the US Army in Vietnam and was awarded the Bronze Star and the Air Medal. He has published eleven books of cartoons and one novel. Visit him at DanzigerCartoons.com.

The Press Needs Pressing After A Hard Presidential Season

The Press Needs Pressing After A Hard Presidential Season

All the press buzz is about the press itself lately. It’s no secret, the Fourth Estate didn’t bring its A-game to covering the 2016 presidential campaign.

The question preying on our minds is whether we did right by the American people in reporting home truths to them. Or did we get mired in the muck of the greatest reality show on earth? Did we get lost in the trees of Twitter, fake news and all that internet stuff? Maybe it’s a “post-truth” world, after all.

In our democracy, much depends on the answers. We like to think the First Amendment is first for a reason, that freedom of the press is indispensable to the America dreamt of by the framers of the Constitution — Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, all the bright white men in Philadelphia.

But here’s the thing: Broadcasting Donald Trump’s rallies and hate-mongering for hours of free airtime, unedited, may not be what they had in mind. Good for ratings, but in retrospect, wrong.

Duck if you can; there’s a lot of guilt and angst flying around Cambridge, Massachusetts, New York and down south to Washington, D.C. The usual rituals have unusual urgency.

At the Kalb Report at the National Press Club, host Marvin Kalb voiced the question of whether a Trump administration will crack down on press freedom. That’s not far-fetched, considering Trump’s open hostility to the media. Kalb, a journalism sage, remembers the good old days when candidates didn’t shout and hurl, “Corrupt!” or “Dishonest!” to the gaggle of reporters trying to do their job.

Trump’s blustering late-night tweets were a way to run around deadlines and the newsroom vetting process, to communicate directly and grow his base, letting loose insults and leaving claims and facts unchecked.

In fits, Trump ripped up the press paradigm of how to cover a presidential candidate. In his first political rodeo, with nothing to lose, he invented a new way to win — lobbing over our heads, always angry or gloating. At first, the press and the public found him more entertaining than others in the Republican field.

That raised a question for the presidential debate moderators, two of whom were Kalb’s guests, Martha Raddatz of ABC News and Chris Wallace of Fox News. Over the 90 minutes, if a candidate makes a false claim, should the moderator correct him or her? Millions of Americans are watching and making up their minds. The answer from Raddatz and Wallace was no, that’s not our job. Let the other candidate say so.

That’s old-school neutrality, but the game has changed so much that it’s time the press becomes more aggressive, too — in the moment, as it happens. We like to scrutinize events at our desks, stewing over coffee, but we have to change with the times, too.

As the president-elect appoints his cabinet, he is sending in the Marines to three major military or homeland security posts. That’s troublesome, but the nightly news is not going to say so. Newspapers have suffered financially over the last decade and some have even physically shrunk and seen their buildings blown up (the Miami Herald.) But it’s no time to be shy when we have a Caeser-like ruler riding into Rome who’d like to silence us into submission. And it’s time to fight back against the fake news “epidemic,” as Clinton said on Capitol Hill on Thursday.

Martin Baron, executive editor of The Washington Post, issued a memo on media harassment and ended it: “Just do your job.” But the climate is changing — indoors and out. (In a glaring omission, the debates failed to discuss climate change.)

One thing’s for sure: If Hillary Clinton had won the presidency, yet lost 2.5 million votes in the popular count, we’d never hear the end of the outrage on Fox, talk radio and on the Breitbart website. Am I “right?”

The cuts and blows to truth are still raw. Looking back at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where opposing campaigns met to debrief, Jennifer Palmieri, Clinton’s director of communications, declared, “I would rather lose than win the way you guys did.”

The late Senator Pat Moynihan wisely said, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.”

Clinton did her level best, and we played by press rules. But not all was fair in the public square.

To find out more about Jamie Stiehm and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com.

IMAGE: A man hands a newspaper to a customer at a news stand in New York, U.S., November 9, 2016. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton

A Perfect Holiday Gift: Subscribe To The News

A Perfect Holiday Gift: Subscribe To The News

If you’re stressing over what to give friends and loved ones during this holiday season, I’m here to help.

Consider giving them print or digital subscriptions — or both — to news organizations you regularly count on to provide strong journalism. That includes national newspapers and magazines, as well as regional papers that anchor your communities. Keep in mind public radio and television stations, too, which always need more financial support.

Now, I understand how you might see this request as self-serving on my part. I am a journalist, to state the obvious; worse, to state the god-awful for some, I am a columnist paid to give my opinion. Surely, I have a vested interest in the survival of my profession.

The thing is, so do you.

Regardless of whom we supported for president, it should concern all of us that we are about to enter a period of alarming uncertainty regarding media access to the White House and to the coming administration. So far, we have no reason to believe that Donald Trump will not continue his campaign practice of abuse and avoidance.

Democracy cannot thrive without journalists who hold accountable those elected to protect it.

No recent president has been fond of the media, but President-elect Trump has taken this wariness to new lows. He has made clear, repeatedly and loudly, that he hates us and sees no reason even to speak to us.

Days after his election, he accused the media of “inciting” protests against him. This was a lie. During his campaign, he banned a growing list of reporters and repeatedly mocked the journalists standing in front of him. He also encouraged supporters at his rallies to taunt the media and call them names.

One photo at a rally showed a Trump supporter wearing a T-shirt promoting lynching of journalists. Do I think Trump supports that? No, but it’s troubling that once the photo went viral, he didn’t denounce this. It’s indisputable that his behavior inspired it.

Journalists and the news organizations that employ them are not about to cave. For all the complaints about media coverage, many of them justified, a large number of journalists, mostly for print organizations, brought close and relentless scrutiny to Trump’s campaign. In this era of increasingly influential “fake news” sites, they are now doubling down on efforts to provide sound reporting that will still include the fact-checks that Trump so loathes.

How he loves his Twitter account. Never stops bragging about the freedom to push out whatever misinformation and outright lies that catch his fancy. He thinks he can get around the media by tweeting, with no apparent concern for the potential harm to Americans and countries around the world. Even if you find his addiction to Twitter entertaining or dismiss it as a mere distraction, please ask yourself this: Why doesn’t the next president of the United States think he should have to answer any questions that don’t come from a family member or a sycophant? What is he hiding? What does he not want you to know?

Doesn’t it make you feel a little bit better to know that journalists will keep trying? Wouldn’t you rather have all the information and decide for yourself what matters?

If you’re holding a newspaper right now to read my column, it’s possible that I’m the only liberal on this page. Many editorial pages skew more conservative, yet here I am.

Think what that says about newspapers and the people deciding what goes on their opinion pages. They may not agree with me, but they publish my opinions anyway because they value the wild tumble of ideas over an echo chamber. I am grateful, of course, to these newspapers and every online site that runs my column. Keeps me writing for a living. But you, too, are the beneficiary of this policy that trusts you to keep an open mind. This is democracy in action — and isn’t it nice to be so respected?

Less than an hour ago, I finished up my last journalism class for this semester as a professional in residence at Kent State University. It is impossible to be cynical in the company of these millennials. They care about journalism and their future in it, and they care about our country, too.

Many of my journalism students were alarmed by the outcome of the presidential race, but they have quickly rallied. They understand their role in keeping our country free, and they are eager to join the profession. I take heart in knowing that soon enough, they’ll be out there.

Let’s support them, shall we? Let’s invest in the future of journalism, while we still can.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and professional in residence at Kent State University’s school of journalism. To find out more about Connie Schultz (con.schultz@yahoo.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

IMAGE: NS Newsflash via Flickr