TRUMP, DEMOCRACY, THE MEDIA AND THE WASHINGTON POST

It is common cause that this Presidential election campaign is regarded like none before. This is largely as a result of the dominating presence and the behavior of the Republican nominee for the President of the United States, Donald J. Trump. His emergence and the prominent role the media has played in his triumph needs examination especially the interrelation between Trump’s ascendency and the ideal of  American democracy. The thesis of this blog is that the checks and balances of society, including the media, (Fourth Estate), have thus far failed to block Mr. Trump’s candidature which in and of itself is felt to be a threat to that democracy. 

AMERICAN DEMOCRACY, THE GOP AND TRUMP

 It is the American style democracy with it’s accent on individualism that has allowed Trump to emerge triumphant as the leader of a Party in which he shares very little in common .This could never have happened in any of the other traditional democracies where the Party leader is invariably steeped in the movement’s value system and culture and is usually elected by the Party infrastructure or by the Party’s elected Representatives. Trump has used the democratic Primary process to effect a bloodless coup of a political party. While the GOP has no formal mechanism to expel members it merely required the will of the Party Establishment to convene a meeting and do so. They didn’t so the issue is irrelevant but the GOP by not exercising its prerogative to utilize democracy’s checks and balances has allowed Trump free reign to challenge American democracy itself. 

Democracy is a fragile institution. To quote Winston Churchill, “ Democracy is the worst form of government till you have tried all the others”. It is dependent on a host of factors both by law and convention. There are those behaviors that are upheld by convention such as you don’t call your opponent’s wife a whore. It is also assumed that you will uphold the constitution should you be elected such as not violating the first amendment by threatening the Press. To put it at its kindest, Donald J. Trump does not inspire any confidence that he gives two hoots about democracy. He is more at home with mob rule and the lynch mob.

THE MEDIA’S TRADITIONAL ROLE OF RESPONSIBILITY - THE FOURTH ESTATE

The media has always been recognized as the Fourth Estate. The latter, is loosely translated in the United States as the fourth branch of democracy . It exists outside of the three branches of government and functions as and independent check on them. 

The Fourth Estate has changed its role dramatically over the past few decades. For generations the overwhelming majority of society placed its faith in the integrity, for example, in the three television networks. Now with the advent of Cable TV among other mediums there is intense competition for viewership. More and more the emphasis has been placed on entertainment but even more on profit. 

In 2005 Tom Fenton, a CBS international correspondent, in his book “Bad News” spelled out what this all meant in the day to day information provided to society through the lens of the nightly news cast. Without laboring his point he documents the commercialization of news and politics. The news program became “cost centers”. They now had to pay for themselves rather than be subsidized by the rest of the programming.  He maintained that the code of public responsibility had been exchanged for ratings. 

More and more media operations including the networks laid off particularly oversea reporters. Fenton flat out blames  the rise of Al Qaeda as a result of this approach. His stories on the growth and activities of the organization were spiked as boring and depressing. As the news anchor informed him if he mentioned a name such as Osama Bin Laden the viewers would pick up their remotes and change the channel. There were minute by minute ratings. In addition CBS turned down interviews with Bin Laden in the nineties. The changed role of the media, Fenton argues, resulted in a lack of public awareness of, for example, the danger of Osama and his Al Qaeda. Had there been an exposure to the threat they posed there may well have not been 9/11 as law makers would have been forced to take note. 

THE MEDIA AND THE EMERGENCE OF TRUMP

A theme of Jay H. Ell’s assessment of American society has been the negative impact of the changing role of the Fourth Estate. It has to bear a large share of the blame that democracy now faces its largest threat since World War 11 in the figure of Donald J. Trump. There is nothing about Trump’s candidacy that fits in with the way democracy is understood to mean in America. Democracy is brittle and can be so abused so as to have a Hitler elected. (Trump has already been called Hitler by one of the major GOP donors, Meg Whitman.) Other examples of the misuse of democracy occurred in Africa where the “one man once vote" mantra turned into becoming "one man one vote once”, while dictatorship by the proletariat became just plain old fashioned dictatorship accompanied by fascism and mass murder. 

The media have irresponsibly covered Trump's every word and action and disproportionately focused on him from the word go affording him billions of dollars of free publicity. The Presidential election race is now one great big reality show with free actors and script and is just ripe for high ratings and advertisement revenue. No challenging and holding The Donald's feet to the fire - just move on and report the next lie or outrageous statement. There was always the fear that he would drop you like he did with a Fox debate holding his own meeting which was dutifully covered by every other channel. 

In spite of this his bizarre policy positions, which change every other day, none seriously challenge them. His serial lying is ignored and the argument is accepted that there is an equivalency between his grotesque positions and Hillary even accepting, for arguments sake, that she lied over her e mails and she is responsible for Benghazi. The problem is that the media kept pretending that Trump was a real candidate and ignored his incongruities so as not to be throwing away their biggest money spinner since the advent of Cable TV. 

So together with the Republican Party, the Fourth Estate has to bear a large part of the responsibility of this threat to America’s freedom. 

THE WASHINGTON POST 

The Washington Post, (WP), is the quintessential example of the Fourth Estate and is famous for the most gutsy revelations of the corruption and deceit of Nixon and his administration in their investigative reporting entitled Watergate. The latter was immortalized in the Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman film, the multiple award winning “All the Presidents’ Men”. The editorial and reporting team were able to effect this as a result of the backing of the owner of the WP, Katherine Graham, who was threatened by Nixon and refused to back down. 

The WP hard hit by the introduction of internet competition fell on hard times and was bailed out in 2013 by Amazon owner, Jeff Bezos, who paid $250 million. In no time he set about revamping the newspaper in a new building, buying new technology and generally moving it into the digital age. He employed a 100 new reporters and the morale was once again restored. The online edition has even exceeded the circulation of the New York Times on occasion. In 2013 Pulitzer Prize winning Martin Baron from the Boston Globe was appointed Editor of the WP. He had been responsible for the investigative reporting of the sexual abuses in the Catholic Church which has been graphically presented in the Academy Award winning movie “Spotlight”. 

AND ALONG CAME TRUMP

Baron as one might expect has complete editorial independence and since his appointment has won 4 Pulitzer prizes for the paper with his investigative reporting style. The 2016 election with the bursting onto the scene of demagog Donald J. Trump with his serial lies and his boastful claims prompted him to appoint 20 reporters to investigate his history. Much of what has broken about Trump’s sordid past has emanated from the WP. Pieces such as “Donald Trump’s Ignorance Laid Bare” and “How a Trump Presidency Could Destabilize Europe” crammed their pages. Their separate feature entitled, Fact Checker, has been a daily rebuttal to almost anything and every thing “The Donald” claims and does.

It didn’t take too long for The Donald to hit back. He withdrew the credentials of the WP reporters to cover his campaign. In typical Trump style he created a bizarre conspiracy theory to explain it all - "Jeff Bezos bought the WP and was using the investigations into him in order to avoid paying taxes for his Amazon company. He uses the WP to protect him". Most of his rant against Bezos was vented via Fox News. He issued a threat to Bezos, who recently overtook Warren Buffet as the richest man in the world. He argued that his was the type of behavior he would crack down on as President. 

WP’S BEZOS DEFIANT  

Bezos was questioned at the Code Conference on his dispute with Trump. (The Code conference is an invitational gathering of the leaders in the field of digital technology). He response was “We live in this amazing democracy with amazing freedom of speech.… It is critical that we should be able to examine our leaders….And a Presidential candidate should embrace that.”  Bezos defended WP against Trump comparing America’s free speech constitution to the dictates in some parts of world where they lock up journalists who disagree with the leaders. 

Bezos made no bones as to how he saw the role of the WP that he had resuscitated. He argued that leaders, including him, should expect to be scrutinized as that was a “cultural norm”. Getting to the very nub of what the American democracy stood for, he contended “…that without cultural norms the Constitution was just a piece of paper”. Alluding to the role that the then owner, Katherine Graham, played when threatened by Richard Nixon he attested, “With Kay Graham as my role model I am ready to let my body parts go through a ringer if need be”. He won't be dissapointed because The Donald style has no subtlety to just let it go and he will not let up in his effort to best Bezos.

POST THE REPUBLICAN CONVENTION THE WASHINTON POST CRYSTALLISES AMERICA’S CHOICE.

In an unprecedented journalistic move, in a front page editorial the WP concluded that Trump was “A Unique Threat to American Democracy”. The lead article detailed chapter and verse their rationale, including his continuing lying, regular changes in policy, lack of experience, his dubious success as a businessman, failure to produce his taxes which is a bipartisan norm, his racism, his exploitation of the unemployed and his failure to show how he will alleviate their plight, his reckless foreign policy where he threatens to abandon NATO, his “cozying” up to dictators and his encouragement of certain nations to obtain nuclear weapons, his total ignorance of the constitution, his threats on the press and a judge who ruled against him, his encouragement of violence at his rallies and his insults and denigrations of individuals and candidates. The historic piece concluded by sadly noting that most of the Republican leaders have lost the courage to take him on. 

This WP lead article that created a stir even in the overcrowded media market and was preceded by a devastating expose in WP Fact Checker feature of Trump’s demagogic Congress rant. The twenty - five key themes that The Donald raised in his Convention speech were found to be untrue, a manipulation of data and or misleading. This is serious as Trump’s message of doom and gloom is predicated on being fact. 

Added to this demolition of Trump as a candidate was the expose by his ghost writer of his center piece of his success, the blockbuster, “The Art of the Deal”. In spite of the usual threats that accompany any criticism of the “blue collar billionaire”, Schwartz detailed what a megalomaniacal fraud and sociopath he was. Schwartz in spite of the risks to himself explained that this matter was to important and the risk to great to have this man's finger on the nuclear trigger. 

AT THE END OF THE DAY

America faces a crisis and the time has come for the majority of the media to stop playing inane games and focus on the alternatives. 

It is not to late for the Republican Party to wash their hands off Trump. They might remember that dumping Goldwater in 1964 did not stop a Nixon Presidency in1968 nor did joining in the bipartisan condemnation of Nixon, forcing him to resign,  prevent twenty - two years of Republic Presidency out of the next thirty four. However if Trump continues unhindered then whatever happens the GOP loses. If he loses the Party will be smashed. If he wins then America loses as well. It is no use hanging around waiting for Godot and for Trump to become Presidential. A hallmark of sociopathy is an inability to learn from one’s mistakes as we have seen this past thirteen months. 

And to those left wingers that are protesting against Hillary you are taking your freedoms for granted. As The Berne has finally reminded them, “This is the Real World”. Regardless of the DNC Committee’s preferences Bernie lost convincingly. As for Trump his favoring of Putin over NATO seems to be paying dividends as Russia through Wikileaks is delivering for him against Hillary. (What a patriot The Donald really is!). 

Even though the demographics point to a Clinton Presidency anything can happen in a two horse race. America’s brittle democracy is on the line.

All this as a backdrop to the Democratic Congress.