During much
of his current term President Donald Trump had to fight accusations
that he had had a secret covenant with the Russians, who helped him rig the
2016 presidential election. There were three prime accusations. The first was
that a Russian organisation, ‘Internet Research Agency’ (IRA), which influences
poll outcomes through social media campaigns, was deployed to run down his
opponent Hilary Clinton and boost his election. The second was more serious and
was about a possible hacking of the computers in the Democratic Party election
offices by the Russian military intelligence agency, GRU. Had this been proven
it would have turned out to be not just Trump’s own ‘Watergate’ but far
worse! The third was about ‘obstruction of justice’.
This article
is not about whether or not President Trump was guilty or not of the
misdemeanours he was accused of but about their treatment by the American
media. The accusations levelled by Trump’s political rivals were orchestrated
by internationally visible sections of the American media like ‘CNN,’ ‘The
New York Times’ and ‘The Washington Post’. Times’
journalists won two Pulitzer prizes for the ‘Trump-Russia’ stories!
The US
Attorney General William Barr appointed Special Counsel Robert Mueller to investigate
the allegations. The report Mueller submitted in March this year did
not find any substantive evidence to prove the allegations. As Byron York
observed in his September 10, 2019, ‘Washington Examiner’ opinion piece
‘the conspiracy-coordination allegation the Times had devoted itself to pursuing turned out to be false … TheTrump-Russia hole came up dry’!
The story
did not end there. Some of The New York Times’ readers and its own
staff were not happy. York wrote ‘many on the Left faulted [The New York
Times] for being insufficiently anti-Trump’! At this point, the issue
spilled out of the media domain. It is no more about disseminating information
or offering comment, however judgemental could it be. It is now more an ethical
dilemma, a reflection of the media scene back home in India. Should a media
organisation behave like a consumer goods supplier or restaurateur and cater to
the tastes of a consumer – assuming a majority of readers the paper caters to
are of a certain political leaning – or remain steadfast to an ideal of
sticking to the truth? And remain neutral till the issue is settled one way or
the other in the appropriate forums? The Times is now caught
between the proverbial Scylla and Charybdis of its own making.
The paper
conducted an internal town-hall meeting for its newsroom staff to assuage
ruffled feelings. It was necessitated because of an uproar over a headline
about the president’s alleged ‘racism’ and tweets from the paper’s staff. ‘Slate’
published a transcript of the recording of the Times’ town-hall meeting edited and curated by Ashley Feinberg. The Times’
Executive Editor, Dean Baquet and Publisher A. G. Sulzberger addressed the
meeting.
A defensive
Baquet seemed to find fault with the readers. He suddenly remembered that it
was not the duty of the media to run political campaigns, but as an independent
media hold administrations accountable! He pointed out the obvious:
“They [the paper’s critics who want
Trump’s head] sometimes want us to pretend that he was not elected president,
but he was elected president.”
What should
be worrying in this episode is the apparent political conditioning of the
staff. Shouldn’t newspaper employees be trained to be neutral observers and
faithful reporters rather than political instruments?
Both York
and Feinberg felt that Baquet’s remark that “the story changed” was
significant. York wonders whether having spent a lot of time and energy on the
‘Trump-Russia’ story (and failed) the Times would spend the
next two years on the “Trump-is-a-racist narrative”?
The ‘The
Fourth Estate’ in the headline does not refer to Geoffrey Archer’s
eponymous novel but to Edmund Burke’s laudatory reference to the press. By the
by, Burke’s first three estates, contrary to popular misperception, were ‘the
Lords Spiritual’, ‘the Lords Temporal’ and ‘the Commons’.
In Irving
Wallace’s brilliant thriller, ‘The Almighty’, the protagonist inherits a
newspaper, a fictional rival of ‘The New York Times’. The conditional
inheritance stipulates that the paper which was way behind its traditional
rival should surpass its circulation for at least one day in the succeeding
year. In order to retain ownership, the protagonist recruits a gang of
terrorists to stage events and then scoop them as news. He sets himself up as ‘The
Almighty’!
The present
media might not go the whole hog to stage terror incidents to scoop stories,
but they were, in the past, halfway there. The way they stoked war hysteria for
George W. Bush to bomb Iraq in the second gulf war in 2003 to destroy elusive
weapons of mass destruction (WMD) was near enough. Are the Times’
and The Washington Post’s anti-Trump campaigns one of a piece with
their earlier war campaigns?
The article
first appeared in The Times Of India Blogs
