Do not look upon incoming President Donald Trump’s widely anticipated assault on the American media with sympathetic detachment. Watch, instead, the way our own media systematically becomes spattered with tar from the same brush.
Attitudes are no longer formed solely from domestic influences. The Internet has not only broken down national information boundaries: It has removed the distinction altogether.
For those who receive most – or all – of their news through social media, the source has become either irrelevant or undefined. As a result, attitudes toward journalists and the institutions in which they work have become as transnational as the platforms from which the viewpoints are formed.
Yes, it’s early days but virtually all of the alarm over Trump’s well-signalled assault on press freedom is being directed at how he will make life very difficult for United States media. It has led to expressions of deep sympathy from abroad for American journalists and a collective exclamation: “Thank God we don’t live there’.
The alarm is well-founded. Reporters Without Borders found that between 1 September and 24 October Trump insulted, attacked or threatened the press at least 108 times. He employed similar tactics in the campaign that first had him elected president, and then went on to employ vindictive tactics against any media that did not accept and endorse his actions and beliefs.
In this presidential term, the arsenal he ranges against journalists could be a good deal more harmful – particularly if Republicans control both houses of Congress. They have already won control of the senate and may well do likewise in the House of Representatives. Congressional power could allow Trump to enact repressive laws that constrain journalists in ways that circumvent First Amendment protection.
Former Washington Post editor, Marty Baron, predicted in The Guardian last week that the media will be under siege: Facing everything from surveillance and prosecution under the Espionage Act, stonewalling and exclusion, to crippling civil law suits bankrolled by Trump-backing billionaires. Baron believes Trump “will use every tool he has, and there are many available to him”. Life is going to be tough for U.S. media.
Alarming though that might be, let’s indulge in a little self-interest on behalf of our own media.
Think back to Trump’s first term (and the lead-up to it). He not only routinely labelled journalists “enemies of the people” and their organisations purveyors of “fake news”, but also set about creating alternative ‘realities’ that challenged the validity of media organisations that sought to provide the public with verified fact.
Unfortunately (for journalists), too many members of the public had by then been conditioned by social media and their secret algorithms to routinely accept those things that supported their own view of the world and to reject those which did not.
Trump did not invent that phenomenon. Cognitive bias has been around for a very long time, but Donald Trump demonstrated in his first term that he is a master at exploiting it.
Remember Kellyanne Conway defending Trump’s press secretary Sean Spicer after he had been caught out making a false statement early in 2017? She referred to Spicer’s provable falsehoods as “alternative facts”. You and I may have laughed derisively but, after the mockery died down, there were more than a few who accepted the validity of her parallel universe…because that cosmos was where they wanted to be.
There was a certain comfort in being able to inhabit this alternative reality. Views that could be shot down in flames in another galaxy far, far away were unchallenged and even celebrated in the universe the believer chose to inhabit.
There is nothing exclusively American about the attraction of such a state of being. Humans like to be right and like to be in groups that think the same as they do. Bandwagoning is a popular pursuit, and it does not give way to reason.
In 1895 Gustave Le Bon wrote a book called The Crowd: A study of the popular mind. In it he said: “It is not even necessary to descend so low as primitive beings to obtain an insight into the utter powerlessness of reasoning when it has to fight against sentiment.” And it is sentiment – not fact – that drives connectivity through social media.
Those social media platforms conditioned 21st century populations to crowd-think. The conspiracy theories that Trump fuelled were driven and amplified on those networks by two things: sentiment and contagion.
Then along came another contagion: Covid. The danger to public health had two effects – threats to personal safety and, in a move to limit that threat, restrictions on rights. Both contributed to the triumph of emotion over reason in too many minds. And it persisted long after the lockdowns ended.
It is still with us.
I have a theory – untested, and arguably unprovable – that this crowd-based state of mind, together with the anti-media rhetoric that flowed from the United States during Trump’s first term, had a profound influence on the attitude that many have toward our own media. It was reflected in the anti-media placards on display during the occupation of Parliament Grounds. The language was straight out of the Trump playbook.
On the Acumen Edelman Trust Barometer, trust in New Zealand media sits below that of government, business, and NGOs and has declined significantly in the past year. AUT’s Journalism Media & Democracy report this year found only a third of New Zealanders trust the news in general. This is below trust levels in comparable countries, including Australia.
I am not going to defend the quality of New Zealand media outputs. They are far from perfect. Yet nor are they so lacking in the core principles of journalism that they deserve that sort of ranking. There must be other influences in play, and I believe anti-media sentiment stemming from Trump and his fellow travellers has had a significant influence on New Zealand public opinion.
It is for that reason that we need to view any moves against the U.S. media in a second Trump term as an assault on journalism in every country where it is a necessary part of democracy – including our own.
It will be only too easy for populist politicians here to take up the Trump mantra, reasoning that using the media as a punching bag will push the right buttons with a section of the electorate. I plead with them to resist the temptation.
It will be only too easy for our media to rail against actions against the Washington press corps but to see it as ‘foreign news’. I plead with them to take those actions personally and defend themselves against unwarranted ‘guilt-by-association’.
It will also be only too easy for New Zealand’s ‘alternative facts’ crowd to tar our media with Trump’s Enemy-of-the-People brush. I plead with them to prove Gustave Le Bon wrong by having second thoughts about the validity of their position.
While I sympathize with the sentiment, Gavin, the NZ media do a crap job of analysing anything more momentous than a cat up a tree story.
Not because they are incapable of analysis, but because they have wrapped themselves in so much wokery, newspeak and right-think that most of the front line reporters are blind to their biases and most of their writing could have been scripted by Grey Lynn HQ.
As for the few remaining Gen X managers, they have mostly fallen victim to Stockholm Syndrome.
In your days at the helm of a paper, would you have turned up your nose at incontrovertible documentary evidence that a government agency had given false information to a high ranking cabinet minister who then published the false information? And just for the extra tabloid bonus points, said minister then in a new media radio interview blamed Adolf Hitler for the false information?
I doubt you would have ignored such a political “gimme”, even if the government agency concerned was beloved for its perceived role at the forefront of fighting climate change.
However, every single legacy media outlet in NZ refused to give that story oxygen. New media and social media on the other hand had a field day.
If legacy media don’t get the message soon, they’ll be dead in the water ten years from now.