WASHINGTON — What do two veteran newsmen think of the current state of journalism – where factual stories are called of “fake news,” other countries, politicians and extremists spread disinformation and attacks on the press are constant at the highest levels of power?
Famed journalists Marvin Kalb and Dan Rather sat down at the Brookings Institution Wednesday to reflect on the state of democracy, freedom of the press and Kalb’s newest book: “Enemy of the People.”
“Thirty-one percent of Americans agree that the press is the ‘enemy of the people,’” Kalb said, citing a poll from the Poynter Institute for Media Studies.
Other data shows support for the press has become yet another partisan issue. Before the 2016 presidential election, 74 percent of Democrats and 77 percent of Republicans supported the media’s “watchdog role,” according to the Pew Research Center. Today, 89 percent of Democrats and only 42 percent of Republicans support that role, the largest divide ever recorded.
Taking its name from President Donald Trump’s notorious labeling of the news media as the “enemy of the American people,” Kalb’s book explores the landscape of a news media marked by growing hostility towards the press.
To the award-winning reporter, Trump’s attacks are an unprecedented assault on journalism, calling them “a program of weakening some fundamental pillars of American society.”
Kalb said he was “stunned” when in February 2017 Trump sent a tweet calling journalists the “enemy of the American people.” Kalb thought of Soviet leader Nikita Kruschev, who criticized Joseph Stalin for the Russian strongman’s attacks on an independent press.
“Even a communist leader was repelled by the thought” of calling the press the enemy of the people, Kalb said.
Kalb traces the use of the phrase in the modern context to Steve Bannon, former Breitbart chief and former adviser to the president. It is “Enemy of the American people,” not “fake news,” Kalb said, that should offend a journalist most.
“Their [journalists] instinct is to be the best friends of the American people,” Kalb said.
No stranger to combatting the powerful, Kalb was on President Richard Nixon’s “enemies list” in the 1970s. Yet Kalb said he never viewed Nixon as “a threat to our democracy.”
However, the two veteran journalists voiced their criticisms of the news media for heavily publicizing Trump throughout the presidential campaign.
“Donald Trump is a creation of the media,” Rather said. “What about our responsibility?”
“Cable news is obsessed with Donald Trump,” Kalb responded, noting profits for media corporations are at an all time during the Trump presidency.
Jutta Merilainen, a Canadian, said she came to the event to learn more about American attitudes towards Trump.
“If you don’t agree with him, you’re the enemy,” she said. “The press’s job is to create thoughts. If we don’t have a press, how do we learn about things?”