Unfreedom of the Press / Несвобода прессы (by Mark R. Levin, 2019) - аудиокнига на английском

Dedicated to and in memory of my wonderful parents, Jack and Norma Levin Loving and beloved, American patriots, and together forever INTRODUCTION UNFREEDOM OF THE PRESS UNFREEDOM OF THE PRESS is about how those entrusted with news reporting in the modern media are destroying freedom of the press from within: not government oppression or suppression, not President Donald Trump’s finger-pointing, but present-day newsrooms and journalists. Indeed, social activism, progressive groupthink, Democratic Party partisanship, opinion and propaganda passed off as news, the staging of pseudo-events, self-censorship, bias by omission, and outright falsehoods are too often substituting for old-fashioned, objective fact gathering and news reporting. A self-perpetuating and reinforcing mindset has replaced independent and impartial thinking. And the American people know it. Thus the credibility of the mass media has never been lower. This book could easily have been ten times its current length, but that would make it unreadable for most. Nonetheless, much ground is covered and research undertaken, and many authors and scholars consulted, as the history of the American press and the evidence of its decades-long demise are carefully examined. The purpose of Unfreedom of the Press is to jump-start a long-overdue and hopefully productive dialogue among the American citizenry on how best to deal with the complicated and complex issue of the media’s collapsing role as a bulwark of liberty, the civil society, and republicanism, ranging from the early newspapers and pamphlets promoting the principles set forth in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, to the subsequent party-press and transparent allegiance to one party or the other, to the progressive approach of so-called professional reporting, and the ideologically driven advocacy press of today. Unlike the early patriot press, today’s newsrooms and journalists are mostly hostile to America’s founding principles, traditions, and institutions. They do not promote free speech and press freedom, despite their self-serving and self-righteous claims. Indeed, they serve as societal filters attempting to enforce uniformity of thought and social and political activism centered on the progressive ideology and agenda. Issues, events, groups, and individuals that do not fit the narrative are dismissed or diminished; those that do fit the narrative are elevated and celebrated. Of course, this paradigm greatly influences the culture, the government, and the national psyche. It defines a media-created “reality” whether or not it has a basis in true reality, around which individuals organize their thoughts, beliefs, and, in some cases, their lives. Yet there is mystery and opacity that surround all of it. And if one dares to question or criticize the motives and work product of this enterprise or aspects of it—that is, the reporting by one or more newsrooms—the response is often knee-jerk and emotionally charged, with the inquirer or critic portrayed as hostile to press freedom and the collective media circling the wagons around themselves. It bears remembering that the purpose of a free press, like the purpose of free speech, is to nurture the mind, communicate ideas, challenge ideologies, share notions, inspire creativity, and advocate and reinforce America’s founding principles—that is, to contribute to a vigorous, productive, healthy, and happy individual and to a well-functioning civil society and republic. Moreover, the media are to expose official actions aimed at squelching speech and communication. But when the media function as a propaganda tool for a single political party and ideology, they not only destroy their own purpose but threaten the existence of a free republic. It is surely not for the government to control the press, and yet the press seems incapable of policing itself. We must remember, we are not merely observers, we are the citizenry. “We the People,” for whom this nation was established and for whom it exists, “in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,”1 must demand a media worthy of our great republic. And we begin the process by informing ourselves about those institutions and individuals (and their practices and standards) who, by their own anointment, proclaim the high-minded obligation of informing us. ONE NEWS AS POLITICAL AND IDEOLOGICAL ACTIVISM WHAT DO WE mean by a “free press,” “press,” or “freedom of the press”? What is the purpose of a free press? Is it to report information? What kind of information? Is it to interpret or analyze information? What is “the news”? How are decisions made about what is newsworthy and what is not? What is a “news organization”? One person (a blogger), a group of people (a weekly newspaper), a corporate conglomerate (a television network)? What is a “journalist”? What qualifies someone as a journalist? Experience, education, position, self-identification? What is the job of a journalist? Is journalism a profession? Are there standards? Are journalists able to be “fair” or “objective”? What is the purpose of reporting? To reinforce the founding and fundamental principles of the republic? To challenge public officials and authority? To give voice to certain individuals, groups, and causes? To influence politics and policy? To alter the status quo of a society? To promote “the common good” of the community? What is the common good? Who decides? What is the difference between freedom of the press and “free speech”? And does the current media revolution, spurred by technological advances such as the internet and social media, change any of this? Do these questions even matter anymore to news outlets? The questions are rarely asked today let alone rationally discussed. They are infrequently the subject of open or public media circumspection or focused and sustained national debate. It seems “the media” are loath to investigate or explore “the media.” However, when the conduct of the media is questioned as biased, politically partisan, or otherwise irresponsible, they insist that they are of one mission: fidelity to the news and all that stems from it—protecting society from autocratic government, defending freedom of the press, and contributing to societal civility and justice. Moreover, they typically claim to pursue and report the news free from any personal or political agenda. Is that true of the modern media? More than seventy years ago, there was a serious self-examination of the media. The Commission on Freedom of the Press (also known as the Hutchins Commission) was organized in 1942 by Time and Life magazine publisher Henry Luce to explore whether freedom of the press was in danger and the proper function of the media in a modern democracy. Its report was issued in 1947 and concluded, in part, that freedom of the press was indeed in danger, and for three basic reasons: “First, the importance of the press to the people has greatly increased with the development of the press as an instrument of mass communication. At the same time the development of the press as an instrument of mass communication has greatly decreased the proportion of the people who can express their opinions and ideas through the press. Second, the few who are able to use the machinery of the press as an instrument of mass communication have not provided a service adequate to the needs of the society. Third, those who direct the machinery of the press have engaged from time to time in practices which the society condemns and which, if continued, it will inevitably undertake to regulate or control.”1 The commission warned: “The modern press itself is a new phenomenon. Its typical unit is the great agency of mass communication. These agencies can facilitate thought and discussion. They can stifle it. They can advance the progress of civilization or they can thwart it. They can debase and vulgarize mankind. They can endanger the peace of the world; they can do so accidentally, in a fit of absence of mind. They can play up or down the news and its significance, foster and feed emotions, create complacent fictions and blind spots, misuse the great words, and uphold empty slogans. Their scope and power are increasing every day as new instruments become available to them. These instruments can spread lies faster and farther than our forefathers dreamed when they enshrined the freedom of the press in the First Amendment to our Constitution.”2 The commission cautioned that “[w]ith the means of self-destruction that are now at their disposal, men must live, if they are to live at all, by self-restraint, moderation, and mutual understanding. They get their picture of one another through the press. The press can be inflammatory, sensational, and irresponsible. If it is, it and its freedom will go down in the universal catastrophe. On the other hand, the press can do its duty by the new world that is struggling to be born. It can help create a world community by giving men everywhere knowledge of the world and of one another, by promoting comprehension and appreciation of the goals of a free society that shall embrace all men.”3 Is this how the modern media conduct themselves? Self-restrained, measured, and temperate? Are the media providing knowledge and insight useful to the public and a free society, or are they obsessed with their own personal, political, and progressive predilections and piques? Have the media earned the respect and esteem of their readers, viewers, and listeners as fair and reliable purveyors of information, or are large numbers of the citizenry suspicious and distrustful of their reporting? Are the media on a trajectory of self-destruction, unofficially identifying with one political party (Democratic Party) over the other (Republican Party)? In point of fact, most newsrooms and journalists have done a very poor job of upholding the tenets of their profession and, ultimately, have done severe damage to press freedom. Many millions of Americans do not respect them or trust them as credible, fair-minded, and unbiased news sources. For example, on October 12, 2018, Gallup reported: “Republicans have typically placed less trust in the media than independents and especially Democrats, but the gap between Republicans and Democrats has grown. The current 55-percentage-point gap is among the largest to date, along with last year’s 58-point gap. President Donald Trump’s attacks on the ‘mainstream media’ are likely a factor in the increasingly polarized views of the media. Republicans agree with his assertions that the media unfairly cover his administration, while Democrats may see the media as the institution primarily checking the president’s power.”4 Furthermore, “Democrats’ trust surged last year and is now at 76%, the highest in Gallup’s trend by party, based on available data since 1997. Independents’ trust in the media is now at 42%, the highest for that group since 2005. Republicans continue to lag well behind the other party groups—just 21% trust the media—but that is up from 14% in 2016 and last year.”5 Another way to look at these statistics is that nearly 80 percent of Republicans distrust the media, while nearly 80 percent of Democrats trust the media. This would seem to underscore the close ideological and political association and tracking between Democrats and the press. Lara Logan, who was a CBS News journalist and war correspondent from 2002 to 2018, spoke frankly in a February 15, 2019, podcast interview about the media’s professional demise, preference for the Democratic Party and progressive advocacy, and intolerance of independent and diverse perspectives in reporting. “Visually—anyone who’s ever been to Israel and been to the Wailing Wall has seen that the women have this tiny little spot in front of the wall to pray and the rest of the wall is for the men. To me that’s a great representation of the American media, is that, you know, in this tiny little corner where the women pray, you’ve got Breitbart and Fox News and, you know, a few others. And then from that—from there on you have CBS, ABC, NBC, ‘Huffington Post,’ Politico, whatever, right, all of them. And that’s a problem for me. Because even if it was reversed, if it was, you know, vastly—mostly, you know, right—on the right and a little bit, that would also be a problem for me. What I—my experience has been that the more—the more opinions you have, the more ways that you look at everything in life, everything in life is complicated, everything is gray, right. Nothing is black and white.”6 Logan continued that this is not about politics or partisanship to her. It is not about pro-Trump or anti-Trump. It is about news reporting. “It’s got nothing to do with whether I like Trump or I don’t like Trump. Right? Or whether I believe him or identify with him, don’t. Whatever. I don’t even want to have that conversation because I approach that the same way I approach anything. I find that is not a popular way to work in the media today because although the media has always been historically left-leaning, we’ve abandoned our pretense or at least the effort to be objective today. . . . The former executive editor of the New York Times has a book coming out, Jill Abramson. And she says, ‘We would do, I don’t know, dozens of stories about Trump every single day and every single one of them was negative.’ Abramson said, ‘We have become the anti-Trump paper of record.’ Well, that’s not our job. That’s a political position. That means we’ve become political activists in a sense. And some could argue, propagandists, right? And there’s some merit to that. We have a few conventions—because they are not really rules—but you need at least two firsthand sources for something, right? Those things help keep your work to a certain standard. Those standards are out the window. I mean, you read one story or another and hear it and it’s all based on one anonymous administration official, former administration official. That’s not journalism. . . .”7 When a journalist breaks from the rest of the media pack, which is quite rare, their careers are typically threatened or ruined by the rest of the press. Indeed, after the Logan interview went viral, she was ostracized or worse, personally attacked by individuals in her own profession. In a subsequent interview on Fox’s Hannity, Logan related that “if there were any independent voices out there, any journalists who are not beating the same drum and giving the same talking points, then we pay the price. What is interesting . . . they cannot take down the substance of what you’re saying. They cannot go after the things that matter. So they smear you personally. They go after your integrity. They tear after your reputation as a person and a professional. They will stop at nothing. I am not the only one. And I am just, I am done, right, I am tired of it. And they do not get to write my story anymore. They do not get to speak for me. I want to say loudly and clearly to anybody who is listening, I am not owned. Nobody owns me. I’m not owned by the left or the right.”8 Indeed, the Commission on Freedom of the Press had specifically emphasized that the media must pay special attention to the difference between fact and opinion. “Of equal importance with reportorial accuracy are the identification of fact as fact and opinion as opinion, and their separation, so far as possible. This is necessary all the way from the reporter’s file, up through the copy and makeup desks and editorial offices, to the final, published product. The distinction cannot, of course, be made absolute. There is not fact without a context and no factual report which is uncolored by the opinions of the reporter. But modern conditions require greater effort than ever to make the distinction between fact and opinion. . . .”9 Having ignored the blaring warning of the commission, the media have knowingly commingled fact and opinion and have, in fact, regularly taken up the policies and causes of the Democratic Party. Consequently, the public’s attitude toward the modern media is divided largely along ideological and party lines. In January 2018, Knight Foundation–Gallup published its survey of 19,000 U.S. adults. It found that “Americans believe that the media have an important role to play in our democracy—yet they don’t see that role being fulfilled.”10 “Eighty-four percent of Americans believe the news media have a critical or very important role to play in democracy, particularly in terms of informing the public—yet they don’t see that role being fulfilled and less than half (44 percent) can name an objective news source.”11 As in the Gallup survey, analysts found that “[w]hile the majority of Americans clearly recognized the importance of media in a democracy, there were clear differences between Democrats and Republicans in their views of the media. While 54 percent of Democrats have a very or somewhat favorable opinion of the media, 68 percent of Republicans view the news media in an unfavorable light.”12 “Democrats,” Gallup reported, “largely trust the media and Republicans largely distrust it. The divergence based on political affiliation was also seen in perceptions of bias in the news. Forty-five percent of Americans say there is a ‘a great deal’ of political bias in news coverage (up from 25 percent in 1989); 67 percent of Republicans say they see ‘a great deal’ of political bias in the news, versus only 26 percent of Democrats.”13 As will become clear, the perceptions revealed in these surveys are realities, and the evidence is overwhelming that journalists as a group reject, in one form or another, the commission’s admonition that reporters should strive to separate fact from opinion; rather, in varying ways and to different degrees, they embrace the idea of news “interpretation” or news “analysis” in the selection, gathering, and reporting of news, influenced by and filtered through the progressive mentality. While there is much more to the commission’s report, its closing summary is especially noteworthy: “The character of the service required of the American press by the American people differs from the service previously demanded, first, in this—that it is essential to the operation of the economy and to the government of the Republic. Second, it is a service of greatly increased responsibilities both as to the quantity and as to the quality of the information required. In terms of quantity, the information about themselves and about their world made available to the American people must be as extensive as the range of their interests and concerns as citizens of the self-governing, industrialized community in the closely integrated modern world. In terms of quality, the information provided must be provided in such a form, and with so scrupulous a regard for the wholeness of the truth and the fairness of its presentation, that the American people may make for themselves, by the exercise of reason and of conscience, the fundamental decisions necessary to the direction of their government and of their lives.”14 A more recent effort to define modern journalism was undertaken by former journalists Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, who claim to have “distilled from our search, some clear principles that journalists agree on—and that citizens have a right to expect. . . . These are the principles that have helped both journalists and the people in self-governing systems to adjust to the demands of an ever more complex world. They are the elements of journalism. The first among them is that the purpose of journalism is to provide people with information they need to be free and self-governing.”15 Kovach and Rosenstiel list the elements of journalism as follows: • Journalism’s first obligation is to the truth. • Its first loyalty is to citizens. • Its essence is a discipline of verification. • Its practitioners must maintain an independence from those they cover. • It must serve as an independent monitor of power. • It must provide a forum for public criticism and compromise. • It must strive to make the significant interesting and relevant. • It must keep the news comprehensive and in proportion. • Its practitioners have an obligation to exercise their personal conscience. • Citizens, too, have rights and responsibilities when it comes to news.16 These elements of journalism appear noncontroversial when taken at face value. But are they, in truth, the working guidelines for most modern newsmen? Kovach and Rosenstiel fear that the great challenge—if not threat—to journalism today, as differentiated from past press transitions, results from the nature of the ownership of news outlets. “For the first time in our history, the news increasingly is produced by companies outside journalism, and this new economic organization is important. We are facing the possibility that independent news will be replaced by rumor and self-interested commercialism posing as news. If that occurs, we will lose the press as an independent institution, free to monitor the other powerful forces and institutions in society.”17 “In the new century, one of the most profound questions for a democratic society is whether an independent press survives. The answer will depend on whether journalists have the clarity and conviction to articulate what an independent press means and whether, as citizens, the rest of us care.”18 While the consolidation of news outlets may or may not threaten the independence of news reporting, depending on the relationship between the particular conglomerate and the acquired news company, perhaps of greater moment is the advent of social media and its influence on news reporting. In either case, regardless of platform, format, or structure, the more important issue relates to content—that is, what is the nature and purpose of the modern newsroom and journalism. Kovach and Rosenstiel raise the issue of “diversity” in the newsroom, which they argue is a vital priority to ensure the integrity of the news product and the credibility of those who produce it. They write, among other things, that “[t]he goal of diversity should be to assemble not only a newsroom that might resemble the community but also one that is as open and honest so that this diversity can function. This is not just racial or gender diversity. It is not just ideological diversity. It is not just social class or economic diversity. It is not just numerical diversity. It is what we call intellectual diversity, and it encompasses and gives meaning to all the other kinds.”19 Is not the greater danger to an independent press “ideology” in the newsroom? Whether a monopoly of ideologically based reporting, which plainly exists today, or “intellectual diversity,” should not ideology be reserved for the opinion-editorial pages of newspapers or the commentary segments of broadcasts? Whatever happened to “professional journalism” and the promise or at least suggestion that the press ought to pursue the objective truth in the gathering and reporting of news? But apparently even the notion of objectivity in reporting is subject to dispute and debate. During the turn of the last century, particularly in the early 1920s, as the Progressive Era began to take hold, the “scientific” approach to journalism—that is, a press held to certain professional standards and processes—spread through newsrooms, as it spread through government. Kovach and Rosenstiel give voice to the arguments made in 1919 by Walter Lippmann, a venerated reporter and commentator at the time, and Charles Merz, an associate editor of the New York World, in which they condemned the New York Times’ coverage of the Russian Revolution. Lippmann and Merz wrote, in part, that “[i]n the large, the news about Russia is a case of seeing not what was, but what men wished to see.” The solution, argued Lippmann and Merz, exists in “the scientific spirit. . . . There is but one kind of unity possible in a world as diverse as ours. It is unity of method, rather than aim; the unity of disciplined experiment.” In this, Lippmann and Merz are projecting the progressive approach to most things onto the profession of journalism and the press generally.20 Kovach and Rosenstiel elaborated: “When the concept of objectivity originally migrated to journalism, it was not meant to imply that journalists were free of bias. Quite the contrary. The term began to appear as part of journalism early in the last century, particularly in the 1920s, out of a growing recognition that journalism was full of bias, often unconscious. The call for journalists to adopt objectivity was an appeal for them to develop a consistent method of testing information—a transparent approach to evidence—precisely so that personal and cultural biases would not undermine the accuracy of their work.”21 “In the nineteenth century,” write the authors, “journalists talked about something called realism. This was the idea that if reporters simply dug out the facts and ordered them together, the truth would reveal itself rather naturally. Realism emerged at a time when journalism was separating from political parties and becoming more accurate. It roughly coincided with the invention of what journalists called the inverted pyramid, in which a journalist lines the facts up from the most important to the least important, thinking it helps audiences understand things naturally.”22 But “good intentions” and “honest efforts” are not enough. Thus the journalist’s objectivity is not an issue, they argue. The focus must be on an objective process and standard by which the journalist must gather, digest, and report the news. “In the original concept . . . the journalist is not objective, but his method can be. The key was in the discipline of the craft, not the aim. . . . Most people think of objectivity in journalism as an aim, not a method. And many citizens scoff at this intention, since they have little idea of the methods journalists might be employing. Yet the notion that the aim of objectivity is insufficient without a unity of method to put it into practice is as valid today as ever. . . .”23 It is not clear, then, why Kovach and Rosenstiel raise the issue of newsroom diversity as an imperative unless they understand that an objective method and standard for vetting news is unlikely to occur in a newsroom populated by ideologues and party partisans. The aims then become the goal. Kovach and Rosenstiel as much as admit it. Even so, if the measure of modern journalism is, at least in part, determined by the intellectual diversity of newsrooms, it is apparent if not obvious that news outlets and journalists are overwhelmingly progressive in their thinking and attitudes and share the ideological mindset characteristic of the present-day Democratic Party—the same progressive mindset that has devoured so many of the nation’s cultural and societal institutions during the last century, as I explain at length in Rediscovering Americanism: And the Tyranny of Progressivism. George Mason professor Tim Groseclose, formerly of the University of California, Los Angeles, developed an “objective, social-scientific method” in which he calculates how the progressive political views of journalists and media outlets distort the natural views of Americans. It “prevents us from seeing the world as it actually is. Instead, we see only a distorted version of it. It is as if we see the world through a glass—a glass that magnifies the facts that liberals want us to see and shrinks the facts that conservatives want us to see. The metaphoric glass affects not just what we see, but how we think. That is, media bias really does make us more liberal. Perhaps worst of all, media bias feeds on itself. That is, the bias makes us more liberal, which makes us less able to detect the bias, which allows the media to get away with more bias, which makes us even more liberal, and so on.”24 Groseclose continues: “U.S. newsrooms are extremely one-sided. One consequence of this is what I call the first-order problem of an unbalanced newsroom. This is the simple fact that if you read a newspaper article or watch a television news clip, then almost surely it will have been written or produced by a liberal. But another consequence, which I call the second-order problem, may be worse. Two effects of the second-order problem are the minority-marginalization principle, in which members of the majority group sometimes treat members of the minority group as if they don’t exist. And on the occasions when they do remember that the minority group exists, they sometimes treat the members as if they are mildly evil or subhuman.”25 Groseclose argues that another effect is the “extremism-redefined principle,” in which “the terms ‘mainstream’ and ‘extreme’ take on new meaning within the group. When the group is, say, very liberal, mainstream Democratic positions begin to be considered centrist, and positions that would normally be considered extremely left-wing become commonplace.”26 The American Press Institute cautions that there is such a bias that “used to be called ‘pack journalism.’ It has also been called ‘group think.’ It is the story-line that the press corps en masse is telling or repeating. A modern term for it is the master narrative. . . . These master narratives can become a kind of trap or rut. The journalist picks facts that illustrate a master narrative, or current stereotype, and ignores other facts.”27 Let us examine some significant evidence—reports, surveys, and studies—that does a good job of underscoring Groseclose’s observations and assessing the ideological and political nature of the modern media, and which raise serious questions about the diversity, objectivity, and/or impartiality of reporting. A 2014 study conducted by Indiana University professors Lars Willnat and David H. Weaver, based on online interviews with 1,080 American journalists that were conducted during the fall of 2013, reveals that although 50.2 percent of journalists identified as independent and 14.6 percent as “other,” the number identifying as Democratic was 28.1 percent compared to merely 7.1 percent as Republican.28 “In 1971, the first time the survey was conducted (this was its fifth incarnation), some 25.7 percent of journalists polled said they identified as Republican.”29 Moreover, the fact that approximately 65 percent of these journalists self-identify as either political independents or other does not necessarily mean they are without a partisan or ideological outlook, which may well motivate or influence their reporting. Indeed, during the last several decades alone, poll after poll and survey after survey have demonstrated the media are more liberal than the public at large.30 A November 2018 survey of 462 financial journalists by professors at Arizona State University and Texas AandM University, of which more than 70 percent of those surveyed were affiliated with the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Bloomberg News, Associated Press, Forbes, the New York Times, Reuters, or the Washington Post, revealed that even most financial journalists are political progressives. When asked, “Generally speaking, how would you describe your political views?” the journalists responded: very liberal (17.63 percent); somewhat liberal (40.84 percent); moderate (37.12 percent); somewhat conservative (3.94 percent); and, very conservative (.046 percent). Thus nearly 60 percent of financial journalists surveyed were liberal and less than 5 percent were conservative.31 The Center for Public Integrity, a left-of-center organization, reports that “[c]onventional journalistic wisdom holds that reporters and editors are referees on politics’ playing field—bastions of neutrality who mustn’t root for Team Red or Team Blue, either in word or deed. . . . [However, in the 2016 presidential election], people identified in federal campaign finance filings as journalists, reporters, news editors or television news anchors—as well as other donors known to be working in journalism—have combined to give more than $396,000 to the presidential campaigns of Clinton and Trump. Nearly all of that money—more than 96 percent—. . . benefited Clinton: About 430 people who work in journalism have, through August [2016], combined to give about $382,000 to the Democratic nominee.”32 And what of the incestuous relationship between journalists and the last Democratic administration? On September 12, 2013, the Atlantic, a progressive media outlet, reported that there were at least twenty-four journalists who transitioned from media jobs to working in the Obama administration. Here is some of what the Atlantic’s Elspeth Reeve uncovered: • Time managing editor Rick Stengel moved to the State Department as undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs; • Douglas Frantz, who wrote for the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, was an assistant secretary of state for public affairs; • Boston Globe online politics editor Glen Johnson was a senior adviser at the State Department; • Washington Post writer Stephen Barr moved to the Labor Department as senior managing director of the Office of Public Affairs; • Washington Post congressional reporter Shailagh Murray became Vice President Joe Biden’s communications director and later senior adviser to President Obama; • Rosa Brooks was a columnist for the Los Angeles Times before taking a position with the undersecretary of defense for policy; • The Washington Post’s Desson Thomson left the paper to serve as a speechwriter for the U.S. ambassador to Britain; • Roberta Baskin, a onetime CBS News investigative reporter, joined the Department of Health and Human Services as a senior communications adviser; • The Washington Post’s Warren Bass, an Outlook section deputy editor, joined then–United Nations ambassador Susan Rice as director of speechwriting and senior policy adviser; • Education Week reporter David Hoff moved to the Education Department; • CNN senior political producer Sasha Johnson joined the Department of Transportation and later became chief of staff at the Federal Aviation Administration; • The Chicago Tribune’s Jill Zuckman moved to the Department of Transportation as communications director; • Rick Weiss, who had worked for the Washington Post, became communications director and senior policy strategist for the White House Office of Science and Technology; • Former CBS and ABC reporter Linda Douglass joined the Obama campaign and was later communications director for the White House Office of Health Reform; • New York Times reporter Eric Dash moved to the Treasury Department’s public affairs office, as did MSNBC producer Anthony Reyes; • CNN’s Aneesh Raman worked for the Obama campaign and later as speechwriter for President Obama; • CNN’s national security reporter Jim Sciutto, formerly with ABC News, served as chief of staff to United States Ambassador to China Gary Locke; • and San Francisco Chronicle environment reporter Kelly Zito joined the Environmental Protection Agency’s public affairs office.33 Notably, Time magazine Washington bureau chief Jay Carney became communications director for Vice President Biden and subsequently press secretary to President Obama. You would be hard-pressed to find a similar extensive relationship between numerous major media organizations and recent Republican administrations. Moreover, what of family ties between the press and the Obama administration? On June 12, 2013, the Washington Post’s Paul Farhi found the following: “ABC News President Ben Sherwood . . . is the brother of Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, a top national security adviser to President Obama. His counterpart at CBS, news division president David Rhodes, is the brother of Benjamin Rhodes [deputy national security adviser for strategic communications]. CNN’s deputy Washington bureau chief, Virginia Moseley, is married to Tom Nides, [formerly] deputy secretary of state under Hillary Rodham Clinton. Further, White House press secretary Jay Carney’s wife is Claire Shipman, a veteran reporter for ABC. And [National Public Radio’s] White House correspondent, Ari Shapiro, is married to a lawyer, Michael Gottlieb, who joined the White House counsel’s office.” Vice President Biden’s onetime communications director “Shailagh Murray . . . is married to Neil King, one of the Wall Street Journal’s top political reporters.”34 Nonetheless, Farhi cites numerous media executives who insist that protections of various sorts are in place to prevent conflicts. There are other former Democratic staffers who now work in the media and some have long family ties to the Democratic Party. For example: • MSNBC’s Chris Matthews previously worked for, among others, President Jimmy Carter and Democratic House Speaker Tip O’Neill. • CNN’s Chris Cuomo is brother to New York’s Democratic governor, Andrew Cuomo. • CNN’s Jake Tapper worked for Democratic congresswoman Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky and Handgun Control Inc. • ABC’s Cokie Roberts’s father was Hale Boggs, the House Democratic majority leader. • Of course, ABC’s George Stephanopoulos worked for President Bill Clinton. There are others, including some Republicans, but this provides a sense of the coziness between the national Washington, D.C., media and the Democratic Party. There are also other influences on reporting, including a “geographic bubble.” Politico, a progressive media website, notes that “[t]he national media really does work in a bubble,” which it contends is “something that wasn’t true as recently as 2008. And the bubble is growing more extreme. Concentrated heavily along the coasts, the bubble is both geographic and political. If you’re a working journalist, odds aren’t just that you work in a pro-Clinton county—odds are that you reside in one of the nation’s most pro-Clinton counties.” Blaming the decline on the newspaper business and the rise of internet-based online reporting for this bubble, correspondents Jack Shafer and Tucker Doherty write that “[t]his isn’t just a shift in medium. It’s also a shift in sociopolitics, and a radical one. Where newspaper jobs are spread nationwide, internet jobs are not: Today, 73 percent of all internet publishing jobs are concentrated in either the Boston–New York–Washington–Richmond corridor or the West Coast crescent that runs from Seattle to San Diego and on to Phoenix. The Chicagoland area, a traditional media center, captures 5 percent of the jobs, with a paltry 22 percent going to the rest of the country. And almost all the real growth of internet publishing is happening outside the heartland, in just a few urban counties, all places that voted for Clinton. So when your conservative friends use ‘media’ as a synonym for ‘coastal’ and ‘liberal,’ they’re not far off the mark.”35 Shafer and Doherty conclude that “[n]early 90 percent of all internet publishing employees work in a county where Clinton won, and 75 percent of them work in a county that she won by more than 30 percentage points. When you add in the shrinking number of newspaper jobs, 72 percent of all internet publishing or newspaper employees work in a county that Clinton won. By this measure, of course, Clinton was the national media’s candidate. . . . The people who report, edit, produce and publish news can’t help being affected—deeply affected—by the environment around them.”36 Given these various studies and analyses, are journalists nonetheless able to put aside their progressive ideological mindset and political partisanship in a relatively objective or impartial pursuit of news? Is that even still a goal of modern journalism? A recent study by the nonpartisan Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy suggests not—certainly with regard to the presidency of Donald Trump. On May 18, 2017, the Shorenstein Center issued a comprehensive analysis of news coverage of the first one hundred days of the Trump administration. Among its conclusions: Trump’s attacks on the press have been aimed at what he calls the “mainstream media.” Six of the seven U.S. outlets in our study—CBS, CNN, NBC, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post—are among those he’s attacked by name. All six portrayed Trump’s first 100 days in highly unfavorable terms. CNN and NBC’s coverage were the most unrelenting—negative stories about Trump outpaced positive ones by 13-to-1 on the two networks. Trump’s coverage on CBS also exceeded the 90 percent [negative] mark. Trump’s coverage exceeded the 80 percent level in The New York Times (87 percent negative) and The Washington Post (83 percent negative). The Wall Street Journal came in below that level (70 percent negative), a difference largely attributable to the Journal’s more frequent and more favorable economic coverage. Fox was the only outlet where Trump’s overall coverage nearly crept into positive territory—52 percent of Fox’s reports with a clear tone were negative, while 48 percent were positive. Fox’s coverage was 34 percentage points less negative than the average for the other six outlets. . . . Trump’s coverage during his first 100 days was not merely negative in overall terms. It was unfavorable on every dimension. There was not a single major topic where Trump’s coverage was more positive than negative.37 These findings, particularly as they relate to Fox, are telling. The prevailing criticism of Fox, especially by its media competition, is that it is in the tank for Trump. While some Fox hosts and programs are more supportive of the president than others—and the distinction at Fox between the news programming and opinion programming is much better delineated than at CNN and MSNBC—the statistics gathered by the Shorenstein Center suggest that the Fox coverage overall is much more evenhanded than at other news outlets, which are overwhelmingly negative. This may seem surprising given all the stories about Fox in the print and broadcast media portraying Fox as unfair and unbalanced in its coverage. Indeed, Fox and its executives and hosts are frequent targets of other press operations, such as the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Politico, CNN, MSNBC, etc., in which journalists and progressive commentators for these news outlets seem fixated with diminishing Fox’s public standing and reputation and, in some instances, even promote commercial boycotts against certain Fox hosts and shows. The reason seems apparent: Fox defies the near ideological and political uniformity of the other media outlets, in which their coverage of Trump is “unfavorable on every dimension.”38 The Shorenstein Center provides a thoughtful piece of advice to newsrooms and journalists. “Journalists would . . . do well to spend less time in Washington and more time in places where policy intersects with people’s lives. If they had done so during the presidential campaign, they would not have missed the story that keyed Trump’s victory—the fading of the American Dream for millions of ordinary people. Nor do all such narratives have to be a tale of woe. America at the moment is a divided society in some respects, but it’s not a broken society and the divisions in Washington are deeper than those beyond the Beltway.”39 By comparison, on April 28, 2009, the Pew Research Center issued its study of media reports on the Obama administration’s first one hundred days. Pew reported that “President Barack Obama has enjoyed substantially more positive media coverage than either Bill Clinton or George Bush during their first months in the White House, according to a new study of press coverage. Overall, roughly four out of ten stories, editorials and op-ed columns about Obama have been clearly positive in tone, compared with 22% for Bush and 27% for Clinton in the same mix of seven national media outlets during the same first two months in office, according to a study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. The study found positive stories about Obama have outweighed negative by two-to-one (42% vs. 20%) while 38% of stories have been neutral or mixed.”40 There are numerous other examples of the media’s progressive political and ideological bias, including more studies and surveys, illustrating its widespread existence.41 Yet the evidence is often dismissed, denied, spun, or made righteous. But it is unequivocal. Indeed, in a growing number of circles, the ideological mission of news organizations and journalists is no longer subterranean. Their advocacy and mission are open and unambiguous. For example, New York University professor Jay Rosen is a leading voice in the idea of so-called public or civic journalism—that is, the purpose-driven, community-based social activism journalism movement spreading throughout America’s newsrooms for the last several decades. A harsh critic of then-candidate Donald Trump, Rosen wrote in the Washington Post: “Imagine a candidate who wants to increase public confusion about where he stands on things so that voters give up on trying to stay informed and instead vote with raw emotion. Under those conditions, does asking ‘Where do you stand, sir?’ serve the goals of journalism, or does it enlist the interviewer in the candidate’s chaotic plan? I know what you’re thinking, journalists: ‘What do you want us to do? Stop covering a major party candidate for president? That would be irresponsible.’ True. But this reaction short-circuits intelligent debate. Beneath every common practice in election coverage there are premises about how candidates will behave. I want you to ask: Do these still apply? Trump isn’t behaving like a normal candidate; he’s acting like an unbound one. In response, journalists have to become less predictable themselves. They have to come up with novel responses. They have to do things they have never done. They may even have to shock us.”42 “They may need to collaborate across news brands in ways they have never known,” Rosen adds. “They may have to call Trump out with a forcefulness unseen before. They may have to risk the breakdown of decorum in interviews and endure excruciating awkwardness. Hardest of all, they will have to explain to the public that Trump is a special case, and the normal rules do not apply.”43 The news reporting about candidate Trump, President Trump, the Trump administration, and Trump supporters certainly gives every indication that Rosen’s public or civic social activism approach to journalism has a firm grip on modern newsrooms and journalists. But it can also be discerned more broadly in the topics the news media ignore, report, or report repeatedly, as well as the manner in which they are reported and the selection of “experts” or public officials to support certain positions, etc. Twenty-five years ago, teacher and journalist Alicia C. Shepard explained that Rosen’s approach to journalism and “[t]he goal of public journalism—a.k.a. civic journalism, public service journalism or community-assisted reporting—is to ‘reconnect’ citizens with their newspapers, their communities and the political process, with newspapers playing a role not unlike that of a community organizer. According to the gospel of public journalism, professional passivity is pass?; activism is hot. Detachment is out; participation is in. . . .”44 At the time, Marvin Kalb, then director of the Shorenstein Center and a former journalist, said, “I think the movement is one of the most significant in American journalism in a long time. This is not a flash in the pan phenomenon. It’s something that seems to be digging deeper roots into American journalism and ought to be examined very carefully.” Kalb went on to warn, “A journalist who becomes an actor, in my view, is overstepping the bounds of his traditional responsibility. When the journalist literally organizes the change and then covers it, I’m uncertain about such traditional qualities as detachment, objectivity, toughness. . . . The whole point of American journalism has always been detachment from authority so that critical analysis is possible.”45 Rosen and other like-minded social activists of public and civic journalism reject the traditional standards and notions of a free press for, instead, a radical approach to reporting, where the media become an essential instrument for the Progressive Movement. They borrow from the philosophy of, among others, sociologist Amitai Etzioni. Etzioni describes his approach as “people committed to creating a new moral, social and public order based on restored communities, without allowing puritanism or oppression.”46 But Etzioni’s philosophy, Rosen’s teachings and writings, and the practices of journalists throughout America’s newsrooms (the latter wittingly and unwittingly) essentially embrace and share the role of journalism set forth by John Dewey nearly a century ago. Indeed, one might justifiably refer to Dewey, one of the earliest and most influential progressive intellectuals in the nation, as one of the founding fathers of modern journalism. After all, it is abundantly obvious that the Progressive Movement could not and would not overlook or somehow bypass the most important tool of mass communication for advancing its immense ideological program—a radical break from America’s heritage, culture, and founding, particularly the principle of individual freedom and market capitalism (hence the emphasis on “communitarianism”). Dewey declared: “When . . . I say that the first object of a renascent liberalism is education, I mean that its task is to aid in producing the habits of mind and character, the intellectual and moral patterns, that are somewhere near even with the actual movements of events. It is, I repeat, the split between the latter as they have externally occurred and the ways of desiring, thinking, and of putting emotion and purpose into execution that is the basic cause of present confusion in mind and paralysis in action. The educational task cannot be accomplished merely by working upon men’s minds, without action that effects actual change in institutions. The idea that dispositions and attitudes can be altered by merely ‘moral’ means conceived of as something that goes on wholly inside of persons is itself one of the old patterns that has to be changed. Thought, desire and purpose exist in a constant give and take of interaction with environing conditions. But resolute thought is the first step in that change of action that will itself carry further the needed change in patterns of mind and character.”47 “In short,” Dewey said, “liberalism must now become radical, meaning by ‘radical’ perception of the necessity of thoroughgoing changes in the set-up of institutions and corresponding activity to bring the changes to pass. For the gulf between what the actual situation makes possible and the actual state itself is so great that it cannot be bridged by piecemeal policies undertaken ad hoc.”48 Moreover, this “liberalism,” while said to be representative of the community and the people, is the opposite. There is no practical way for the public to influence the substance of the news and reporting it receives. Furthermore, the progressive ideology, while claiming to be people oriented, preaches the wisdom of expert masterminds and administrators, and the application of scientific models and approaches to human behavior through centralized decision making. This was well expressed in 1922 by the highly influential newsman and commentator Walter Lippmann, in his classic book, Public Opinion. At the time, Lippmann was a disenchanted socialist, increasingly disillusioned by the public. Consequently, like many progressives, he believed the problem rested with the inability of the citizenry, in a large and complex modern society, to grasp events and rationally discuss or act on them. Lippman wrote that the world is just too complicated for inattentive or busy individuals, focused on their own lives and pursuits, to comprehend events: “The amount of attention available is far too small for any scheme in which it was assumed that all the citizens of the nation would, after devoting themselves to the publications of all the intelligence bureaus, become alert, informed, and eager on the multitude of real questions that never do fit very well into any broad principle. I am not making that assumption. Primarily, the intelligence bureau is an instrument of the man of action, of the representative charged with decision, of the worker at his work, and if it does not help them, it will help nobody in the end. But in so far as it helps them to understand the environment in which they are working, it makes what they do visible. And by that much they become more responsible to the general public.”49 Lippmann contended that the experts, doing their daily business, are to be relied on to improve society: “The purpose, then, is not to burden every citizen with expert opinions on all questions, but to push that burden away from him towards the responsible administrator. An intelligence system has value, of course, as a source of general information, and as a check on the daily press. But that is secondary. Its real use is as an aid to representative government and administration both in politics and industry. The demand for the assistance of expert reporters in the shape of accountants, statisticians, secretariats, and the like, comes not from the public, but from men doing public business, who can no longer do it by rule of thumb. It is in origin and in ideal an instrument for doing public business better, rather than an instrument for knowing better how badly public business is done.”50 And Lippman exhorted that it is the process of expert synthesis and analysis that enables the citizen to make sense of things. “Only by insisting that problems shall not come up to him until they have passed through a procedure, can the busy citizen of a modern state hope to deal with them in a form that is intelligible. For issues, as they are stated by a partisan, almost always consist of an intricate series of facts, as he has observed them, surrounded by a large fatty mass of stereotyped phrases charged with his emotion. According to the fashion of the day, he will emerge from the conference room insisting that what he wants is some soul-filling idea like Justice, Welfare, Americanism, Socialism. On such issues the citizen outside can sometimes be provoked to fear or admiration, but to judgment never. Before he can do anything with the argument, the fat has to be boiled out of it for him.”51 As many regular consumers of news can attest, this condescending elitism, a fundamental characteristic of progressivism, abounds in the attitude of journalists, and undoubtedly in the environment of newsrooms in all their platforms. Professor Charles Kesler of Claremont McKenna College and the Claremont Institute summed up the media’s transformation this way: “Early in the 20th century journalism began to think of itself as a profession. In the 19th century most newspapers had been outgrowths of political parties. Now the rising spirit was non-partisan, independent, and expert, guided by the example of the new social sciences, whether philosophical-historical or more scientific approach. Both recipes came from the same university kitchen, so it was common to find enlisted in the same political causes both the earnest, idealistic, progressive social reformers and the cool, scientific social inquirers of facts and nothing but the facts. . . .”52 Kesler added: “The new journalism, too, grew up thinking of itself as liberal and ‘objective’ at the same time. It was objective insofar as it separated facts from values: reporting the facts, and relegating the values to the editorial pages. But to be objective or scientific in that way was itself a liberal value. Liberals of almost all stripes were confident that those separate facts would eventually line up together as ‘history,’ meta-fact confirming their own version of progress and hence their own values. . . . The front page and the editorial page were ultimately in synch. . . .”53 Lacking confidence in the intelligence and wisdom of his fellow citizens, Rosen insists on indoctrination and manipulation by media elites: “If the public is assumed to be ‘out there,’ more or less intact, then the job of the press is easy to state: to inform people about what goes on in their name and their midst. But suppose the public leads a more broken existence. At times it may be alert and engaged, but just as often it struggles against other pressures—including itself—that can win out in the end. Inattention to public matters is perhaps the simplest of these, atomization of society one of the more intricate. Money speaks louder than the public, problems overwhelm it, fatigue sets in, attention falters, cynicism swells. A public that leads this more fragile kind of existence suggests a different task for the press: not just to inform a public that may or may not emerge, but to improve the chances that it will emerge. John Dewey, an early hero of mine, had suggested something like this in his 1927 book, The Public and Its Problems.”54 Rosen seems to be referencing Dewey’s view of news as providing “meaning”—the “social consequences” of the information. Dewey wrote that “?‘[n]ews’ signifies something which has just happened, and which is new just because it deviates from the old and regular. But its meaning depends upon relations to what it imports, to what its social consequences are.”55 Therefore, reporting events without a social context, and their relationship to the past as part of a continuum, isolates them from their connections. “Even if social sciences as a specialized apparatus of inquiry were more advanced than they are,” Dewey continued, “they would be comparatively impotent in the office of directing opinion on matters of concern to the public as long as they are remote from application in the daily and unremitting assembly and interpretation of ‘news.’ On the other hand, the tools of social inquiry will be clumsy as long as they are forged in place and under conditions remote from contemporary events.”56 Again we are reminded that real news is information infused with progressive social theory. Seton Hall assistant professor and former journalist Matthew Pressman makes a more nuanced case for abandoning fact-based journalism for social activism. He contends that “[t]o some observers, the overriding characteristic of American journalism is liberal bias. But that is inaccurate, because it suggests either a deliberate effect to slant the news or a complete obliviousness to the political implications of news coverage. What truly defines contemporary American journalism is a set of values that determine news judgments. Some are political values: mistrust of the wealthy and powerful, sympathy for the dispossessed, belief in the government’s responsibility to address social ills. Others are journalistic values: the beliefs that journalists must analyze the news, must serve their readers, must try to be evenhanded. These values are not designed to serve any ideological agenda, but they help create a news product more satisfying to the center-left than to those who are right of center.”57 Pressman argues that as a result of certain horrific events in the 1960s and 1970s, no longer could journalists simply report news as objective news without interpretation influenced by progressive values. In other words, journalists should not seek and report facts as news, but launder their news gathering priorities and the facts themselves through a progressive ideology to give them meaning and purpose. Of course, the meaning or purpose happens to promote the progressive policy and political agenda. Inasmuch as this approach mostly excludes the moral and political values of a large population of Americans, it cannot be accomplished in an “evenhanded” way, as Pressman urges. It can merely be said to be evenhanded when, in truth, such an assertion is preposterous and impossible as a matter of fact. This helps explain the modern-day near monopoly of ideologically slanted news reporting. Too often it is biased. Too often it is policy driven. And it is, therefore, “more satisfying to the center-left.” Pressman explains what had been, in his view, the lamentable state of the press a century ago. “Ever since major American newspapers began adopting the ideal of objectivity in the 1910s and 1920s, they had allowed only a select few journalists to interpret the news: editorial writers, opinion columnists, and those writing for special sections in the Sunday edition. . . . Workaday reporters, however, had to stick to the four W’s and one H: who, what, when, where, and how. The ‘why’ question was beyond their purview. With interpretive reporting, that began to change.”58 Consequently, the pursuit and conveyance of objective truth as news is not the journalist’s real purpose or goal anymore, but instead “interpretive reporting” through progressive lenses. “The move toward interpretation,” explains Pressman, “began in the 1950s and continues today, and it has had far-reaching implications. It caused journalists to redefine objectivity, contributed to the public’s mistrust of the news media, and shifted the balance of power in news organizations from editors to reporters. But at the outset, it was—like most profound changes in big, established institutions—simply an attempt to keep pace with the competition [that is, radio, then television, and now the internet].”59 Hence, when the news consumer reads, hears, or sees progressive bias or even political partisanship in the press that appears to closely align with the pronouncements and policies of the Democratic Party and Democratic officials, given its progressive ideological schema, he is not imagining things. A decade before Pressman’s writing, former Washington Post reporter Thomas Edsall was even more blunt and took the argument even further. Edsall proclaimed that “journalism should own its liberalism—then manage it, challenge it, and account for it.” “The mainstream press is liberal. Once, before 1965, reporters were a mix of the working stiffs leavened by ne’er-do-well college grads unfit for corporate headquarters or divinity school. Since the civil rights and women’s movements, the culture wars and Watergate, the press corps at such institutions as The Washington Post, ABC-NBC-CBS News, the NYT, The Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, etc. is composed in large part of ‘new’ or ‘creative’ class members of the liberal elite—well-educated men and women who tend to favor abortion rights, women’s rights, civil rights, and gay rights. In the main, they find such figures as Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Pat Robertson, or Jerry Falwell beneath contempt.”60 Of course, Edsall is correct about the contempt the modern press has for conservatives generally. But it is more than that. It bleeds into open hostility for conservative media institutions, such as conservative talk radio and the Fox News Channel, the latter of which does not even claim to be a conservative news outlet but, rather, a nonconforming media network that uses the moniker “fair and balanced.” Moreover, the media’s progressive mindset and interpretive approach results in the press calling into question virtually every cultural, traditional, and institutional norm, as one might expect. After all, it now functions as an outgrowth of the broader progressive ideological and political project. It also leads to a more myopic view of society and the evident increasing disdain and intolerance newsrooms and journalists openly display for fellow citizens who may not share their ideological attitudes, especially these days supporters of President Trump. Again, this helps explain the synergy between the press and the Democratic Party. Therefore, it logically follows that the Democratic Party mostly benefits from the media’s interpretation of the news. As Gallup reported on April 5, 2017, “[s]ixty-two percent of U.S. adults say the media has a favorite [political party], up from about 50% in past years. Just 27% now say the media favors neither major party. . . . Currently, 77% of Republicans say the media favors one party over the other; in 2003, 59% of Republicans said the same. By comparison, 44% of Democrats now say the media plays favorites, unchanged from the 44% who said so in 2003. . . . Gallup asked those who perceive political bias in the news media to say which party the news media favors. Almost two-thirds (64%) of those who believe the media favors a political party say it is the Democratic Party. Only about a third as many (22%) believe the media favors Republicans. This is not new. Americans who perceive media bias have always said the direction of that bias leaned in favor of the Democrats, although the percentage holding that view has varied.”61 For Edsall, the problem is that “there are very few good conservative reporters. There are many intellectually impressive conservative advocates and opinion leaders, but the ideology does not seem to make for good journalists.”62 Of course, as the studies demonstrate, there are very few conservative reporters in the first place, given the lack of diverse beliefs and attitudes in newsrooms. And the community of journalists is increasingly cloistered by ideology and geography. But Edsall then makes the self-serving assertion that “[i]n contrast, any examination of the nation’s top reporters over the past half-century would show that, in the main, liberals do make good journalists in the tradition of objective news coverage. The liberal tilt of the mainstream media is, in this view, a strength, but one that in recent years, amid liberal-bias controversies, has been mismanaged.”63 Hence liberals far outnumber others in news organizations, liberals are better reporters anyway, and the issue with liberal bias in the media is actually a problem of branding and marketing. Edsall, like Pressman later, must resort to a both self-fulfilling and incoherent formulation of journalism’s purpose to justify liberal media bias and simultaneously reject bias as a criticism. “While the personnel tend to share an ideological worldview,” writes Edsall, “most have a personal and professional commitment to the objective presentation of information.” Edsall’s complaint is that “[t]he refusal of mainstream media executives to acknowledge the ideological leanings of their staffs has produced a dangerous form of media guilt in which the press leans over so far backward to avoid the charge of left bias that it ends up either neutered or leaning to the right.”64 Furthermore, it seems the media’s progressive ideological outlook has in some ways morphed into a moral crusade, as in other societal areas so inflicted with progressive sensibilities during the course of the last century. Kovach and Rosenstiel assert that most journalists “sense that journalism is a moral act and know that all of their background and values direct what they will do and not do in producing it. . . . For many journalists, this moral dimension is particularly strong because of what attracted them to the profession in the first place. When they initially became interested in the news, often as adolescents or teenagers, many were drawn to the craft by its most basic elements—calling attention to inequities in the system, connecting people, creating community. . . . These journalists feel strongly about the moral dimension of their profession because without it they have so little to help them navigate the gray spaces of ethical decisions.”65 A moral imperative to one’s life, let alone career, is certainly noble. It is not exclusive to journalism. It is something to which individuals from all walks of life, in all professions and areas of work, should possess or strive. But if and when morality is defined by or interpreted through a progressive ideology and related policy and political objectives, the outcome is a profession whose members form a class or aristocracy of strident, pretentious, arrogant, and self-righteously superior individuals, rarely capable of circumspection or improvement. This has most recently and particularly revealed itself in the media’s coverage of President Trump. Charles Kesler explains: “President Trump exploits that vulnerability with his criticism of ‘fake news.’ He accuses them not merely of making it up, that is, of getting the facts wrong or concocting ‘facts’ to fit their bias, but also of inventing the very standards by which to conceal and justify their abuses: the fake authority of ‘objectivity,’ nonpartisanship, and progress. They are as partisan as journalists were two centuries ago, but can’t, or won’t, admit it, which means they can’t begin to ask how to moderate themselves. In truth, they may be as much self-deluded as deluding.”66 Thus, for many in the press, the president is challenging their moral paramountcy. And herein lies a major part of the problem: what is the prime objective of “journalism”? Is modern journalism supposed to be a project inculcated with a progressive mindset and value system yet somehow free of bias, as Professor Pressman argues; or, is modern journalism supposed to be a reporter’s pursuit of social activism and a social overhaul, therefore and necessarily an anti-Western reformation, as Professor Rosen demands; or, is it an exclusive club of wise men and women through whom the world is to be explained to the plebes; or, is it supposed to be the gathering and reporting of objective truth and facts, where interpretation and analysis are left to the readers, viewers, and listeners; or, is it an institution that should strengthen the civil society by promoting the nation’s founding principles? The evidence indicates that when it comes to matters of politics and culture, among other things, journalism has become an overwhelmingly progressive enterprise, and the disingenuousness with which it is mostly denied, defended, or even celebrated often leads to a pack mentality, groupthink, repetition, and even propaganda presented as news. However, it must be said, as demonstrated earlier, that the attitude of an increasing number of influential media voices is less concerned with the veneer of objectivity and more open about the progressive ideological outlook that motivates their reporting. This is a project that has been under way for about a century. Therefore the questions raised at the opening of this chapter are more or less answered by the values and mindset of the media’s collective progressive ethos and attachment to social activism. Moreover, as foot soldiers for the Progressive Movement, newsrooms and journalists have also traveled far from the substantive principles and beliefs that animated the early printers, pamphleteers, and newspaper publishers who gave birth to press freedom and American independence. TWO THE EARLY PATRIOT PRESS A BRIEF EXAMINATION of the early history of the American press provides critical context for comparison with its contemporary progeny and a standard by which to measure the current state and purpose of freedom of the press. The history of the early press is thoroughly encumbered with the battle for individual liberty and free speech, both essential elements of the American Revolution for independence. In 1810, Isaiah Thomas, a printer, newspaper publisher, author, and witness to the revolution, published a seminal two-volume book, The History of Printing in America, with a biography of printers, and an account of newspapers. Thomas was among a very few who preserved the records of the printers during the Revolutionary War period. Thomas wrote that “[a]mong the first settlers of New England were not only pious but educated men. They emigrated from a country [England] where the press had more license than in other parts of Europe, and they were acquainted with the usefulness of it. As soon as they had made those provisions that were necessary for their existence in this land . . . their next objects were, the establishment of schools, and a printing press; the latter of which was not tolerated, till many years afterward, by the elder colony of Virginia.”1 A printing house was first established in 1638 at Cambridge, Massachusetts. Printing began in 1639. Thomas praises Rev. Mr. Glover for the early printing press in Massachusetts and America generally, Thomas referring to him as “a nonconformist minister . . . [who] left his native country with a determination to settle among his friends, who had emigrated to Massachusetts; because in this wilderness, he could freely enjoy, with them, those opinions which were not countenanced by the government and a majority of the people in England.” Thus early printing in America mostly related to debates about religion and, later, promoting the gospel and other books to Native Americans (in their language).2 Thomas wrote that “[t]he fathers of Massachusetts kept a watchful eye on the press; and in neither a religious nor civil point of view, were they disposed to give it much liberty. Both the civil and ecclesiastical rulers were fearful that if it was not under wholesome restraints, contentions and heresies would arise among the people. In 1662, the government of Massachusetts appointed licensers of the press, and afterward, in 1664, passed a law that ‘no printing should be allowed in any town with the jurisdiction, except in Cambridge;’ nor should anything be printed there but what the government permitted through the agency of those persons who were empowered for the purpose. . . . It does not appear that the press, in Massachusetts, was free from legal restraints till about the year 1755. . . . For several years preceding the year 1730, the government of Massachusetts had been less rigid than formerly; and after that period, [no] officer is mentioned as having a particular control over the press.”3 “Except in Massachusetts,” Thomas wrote, “no presses were set up in the colonies till near the close of the seventeenth century. Printing then was performed in Pennsylvania, ‘near Philadelphia,’ and afterward in that city, by the same press, which, in a few years subsequent, was removed to New York. The use of type commenced in Virginia about 1681; in 1682 the press was prohibited. In 1709, a press was established at New London, in Connecticut; and, from this period, it was gradually introduced into the other colonies. . . .”4 However, the press—that is, the printing of books, pamphlets, newspapers, etc.—would become free from license and prior restraint years before the revolution. “Before 1775, printing was confined to the capitals of the colonies; but the war occasioned the dispersion of presses, and many were set up in other towns. After the establishment of our independence, by the peace of 1783, presses multiplied very fast, not only in seaports, but in all the principal inland towns and villages.”5 During the lead-up to and commencement of the revolution, and the eventual victory over Britain, Thomas was most impressed with Benjamin Edes, a printer who founded and published the Boston Gazette with John Gill. “When the dispute between Great Britain and her colonies assumed a serious aspect, this paper arrested the public attention, from the part its able writers took in the cause of liberty and their country; and it gained a very extensive circulation.”6 When the British troops arrived in force in Boston, Edes was able to escape “with a press and a few types,” and began printing from Watertown. “In 1776, Edes returned to Boston, on the evacuation of the town by the British army.” Thomas wrote that “[n]o publisher of a newspaper felt a greater interest in the establishment of the independence of the United States than Benjamin Edes; and no newspaper was more instrumental in bringing forward this important event than The Boston Gazette.”7 David A. Copeland, professor at Elon University, writes that by 1768, Edes and others “synthesized all that had happened in terms of the importance of the press. . . . The press, they said, protects the liberties of the people. It keeps government in check. As the voice of the people, the press assures that officials will follow the consent of the governed.”8 Copeland describes how the Gazette declared, under the pseudonym Populus: THERE is nothing so fretting and vexatious; nothing so justly TERRIBLE to tyrants, and their tools and abettors, as a FREE PRESS. The reason is obvious; namely, Because it is, as it has been very justly observ’d . . . “the bulwark of the People’s Liberties.” For this reason, it is ever watched by those who are forming plans for the destruction of the people’s liberties, with an envious and malignant eye. . . . Your Press has spoken to us the words of truth: It has pointed to this people, their danger and their remedy: It has set before them Liberty and Slavery; and with the most perswasive and pungent Language, conjur’d them, in the name of GOD, and the King, and for the sake of all posterity, to chuse Liberty and refuse Chains.” [Capitalization, spelling, and italics as in the original.]9 Professor Carol Sue Humphrey of Oklahoma Baptist University explains that “[h]istorians have long studied and discussed the factors that led to the American Revolution, and they have always given ample credit for the success of the revolt to the press, and particularly the newspapers, for their efforts during the conflict. Even those historians who wrote in the years immediately after the war praised the press for its many contributions to ultimate victory.”10 “During the first half of the nineteenth century,” explains Humphrey, “historians emphasized the patriotism of the printers in their efforts to help America establish its republican system of government as a model for the rest of the world to follow. These scholars are often classified as nationalist or romantic in their outlook and conclusions. For these historians, the American colonies had an important role to play in making the world a better place to live through the spread of democracy and freedom, and the newspapers served well in helping to bring about the break with Great Britain that led to these developments.”11 Humphrey argues that “[t]hese historians continually emphasized the importance of the newspapers in bringing on the revolt against British tyranny and praised the printers for their loyalty and patriotism in the fight for liberty and independence.”12 Indeed, support for independence spread from New England to the rest of the colonies. David Ramsay, one of the first historians of the American Revolution, famously wrote in 1789 that “in establishing American independence, the pen and press had merit equal to that of the sword.” In other words, most of the early printers, pamphleteers, and newspapers in the decades leading up to independence encouraged revolution, and they likewise were supportive of the revolution once war broke out. As Ramsay noted, the role of the early pamphleteers and the relatively few newspapers—forty or fewer by 1775—that existed in the years before the revolution and the commencement of the war was profound. They were not only sources of information, but far and away provided the philosophical, substantive, and even polemical arguments for the causes and principles that animated the revolution and America’s founding. Indeed, in many ways they fashioned the case for liberty, independence, and representative government. Copeland explains that “[b]y the last half of the 1760s, the press had become a partisan tool. Writers regularly proclaimed their rights to a free press. Increasingly, however, the Patriots, those in favor of American independence from Great Britain, attempted to silence opposing voices. What seemed to be a contradiction of demands to speak freely for decades, even centuries among Britons, vanished for a time in the colonies, but there was a purpose. It could be found in the ideas of government as proposed by thinkers such as Locke. When Americans won the Revolution and freed themselves from tyranny and oppression, the press resumed its role as a partisan mouthpiece, and most citizens of the new United States adopted the motto . . . ‘Freedom of speech is the great bulwark of liberty; they prosper and die together.’?”13 The groundwork had been set for what would later become the First Amendment to the Constitution. Harvard professor and historian Bernard Bailyn, who has likely studied more of the early pamphlets than any other scholar, asserts that “influential in shaping the thought of the Revolutionary generation were the ideas and attitudes associated with the writings of Enlightenment rationalism—writings that expressed not simply the rationalism of liberal reform but that of enlightened conservatism as well.” “In pamphlet after pamphlet the American writers cited Locke on natural rights and on the social and governmental contract, Montesquieu and later Delolme on the character of British liberty and on the institutional requirements for its attainment.”14 The pamphlets, of which there were several hundred between 1750 and 1776, were, Bailyn writes, “[e]xplicit as well as declarative, and expressive of the beliefs, attitudes, and motivations as well as of the professed goals of those who led and supported the Revolution.” They confirm that the Revolution was “above all else an ideological-constitutional struggle and not primarily a controversy between social groups undertaken to force changes in the organization of society. It confirmed . . . that intellectual developments in the decades before Independence led to a radical idealization and rationalization of the previous century and a half of American experience, and that it was this intimate relationship between Revolutionary thought and the circumstances of life in eighteenth-century America that endowed the Revolution with its peculiar force and made of it a transforming event.”15 Therefore, while the revolution was undeniably a transforming event, it was not about the “fundamental transformation” of American civil society itself, as President Barack Obama would proclaim about his own election. Moreover, its purpose and principles were the antithesis of and incompatible with the philosophies that undergird the modern Progressive Movement, such as those espoused by German philosophers Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx, and later American progressive intellectuals including Herbert Croly, Woodrow Wilson, John Dewey, and Walter Weyl, among others. Bailyn makes the critical point that “[w]hat was essentially involved in the American Revolution was not the disruption of society, with all the fear, despair, and hatred that entails, but the realization, the comprehension and fulfillment, of what was taken to be America’s destiny in the context of world history. The great social shocks that in the French and Russian Revolutions sent the foundation of thousands of individual lives crashing into ruins had taken place in America in the course of the previous century, slowly, silently, almost imperceptibly, not as a sudden avalanche but as myriads of individual changes and adjustments which had gradually transformed the order of society. By 1763 the great landmarks of European life . . . had faded in their exposure to the open, wilderness environment of America. But until the disturbances of the 1760s these changes had not been seized upon as grounds for a reconsideration of society and politics.” By the end of 1776, “Americans came to think of themselves as in a special category, uniquely placed by history to capitalize on, to complete and fulfill, the promise of man’s existence. The changes that had overtaken their provincial societies, they saw, had been good: elements not of deviance and retrogression but of betterment and progress; not a lapse into primitivism, but an elevation to a higher plane of political and social life than had ever been reached before.” Bailyn writes, “It was the most creative period in the history of American political thought. Everything that followed assumed and built upon its results.”16 Bailyn states that the pamphlets published before and during the revolution and American independence were so important that “everything essential to the discussion of those years appeared, if not original then in reprints, in pamphlet form. The treatises, the sermons, the speeches, the exchanges of letters published as pamphlets—even some of the most personal polemics—all contain elements of this great, transforming debate.”17 Indeed, Bailyn writes, “[e]xpressing vigorous, polemical, and more often than not considered views of the great events of the time; proliferating in chains of personal vituperation; and embodying to the world the highly charged sentiments uttered on commemorative occasions, pamphlets appeared year after year and month after month in the crisis of the 1760s and 1770s. More than 400 of them bearing on the Anglo-American controversy were published between 1750 and 1776; over 1,500 appeared by 1783.18 One of the great pamphleteers was, of course, Thomas Paine. Although a recent immigrant from Britain, coming to Philadelphia in October 1774, Paine became a decisive voice for American independence. On January 10, 1776, Paine’s essay, Common Sense, was published as a pamphlet. Only forty-eight pages long and written in plain English, the pamphlet spread throughout the colonies. The Constitution Center points out that it sold an amazing 120,000 copies in its first three months, and an estimated 500,000 copies by the end of the revolution. An estimated 20 percent of colonists owned a copy of the pamphlet.19 Numerous newspapers also reprinted it, in whole or part. It is indispensable, therefore, when writing about the press then and now, to examine key elements of this enormously influential pamphlet and the ideas and principles it promoted, contrasted with the ideas and principles of the modern media and the progressive ideology. Common Sense begins with a statement about the distinction between society and government, and the latter’s limitations in a free society: Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.20 Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a Government, which we might expect in a country without Government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer. . . .” [Italics are in the original.]21 As the colonies increase in population and distance grows between members of society, and as public concerns multiply, a government of representatives small in size and confined in power becomes necessary, writes Paine, to “establish a common interest with every part of the community, [and] they will mutually and naturally support each other. . . .” “I draw my idea of the form of government from a principle in nature which no act can overturn, viz. that the more simple any thing is, the less liable it is to be disordered, and the easier repaired when disordered. . . .”22 Paine believed in the primacy of individual liberty; he was hostile to large institutions and averse to taxation and government regulation. For the modern Progressive Movement, and its media voices and scribes, Paine’s conception of government is too messy and too dispersed to allow for the required “expert” decision making and “scientific” planning required of a centralized administrative state. Paine then attacks the British monarchy and hereditary succession: [T]here is . . . a greater distinction for which no truly natural or religious reason can be assigned, and that is the distinction of men into KINGS and SUBJECTS. Male and female are the distinctions of nature, good and bad the distinctions of Heaven; but how a race of men came into the world so exalted above the rest, and distinguished like some new species, is worth inquiring into, and whether they are the means of happiness or of misery to mankind.23 Paine continues: England, since the conquest, hath known some few good monarchs, but groaned beneath as much larger number of bad ones, yet no man in his senses can say that their claim under William the Conqueror is a very honorable one. A French bastard, landing with an armed banditti, and establishing himself king of England against the consent of the natives, is in plain terms a very paltry rascally original. It certainly hath no divinity in it. However, it is needless to spend much time in exposing the folly of hereditary right, if there are any so weak as to believe it, let them promiscuously worship the ass and lion, and welcome. I shall neither copy their humility, nor disturb their devotion.24 Of course, the progressive and modern media would agree with Paine’s condemnation of monarchy and hereditary succession, but what of the enormous power exercised today by lifetime-appointed judges, who micromanage more and more of society; unelected bureaucrats employed by scores of government departments and agencies, who legislate not through elected members of Congress but by the issuance of untold regulations and rules; and, the surrendering of sovereign legal and policy authority to international organizations, thereby conferring governing decisions to organizations that exist outside the Constitution’s framework? Is this a republican design of representative government of which Paine and his fellow countrymen would approve? Yet this is the design and increasing reality of progressive governance. Paine follows with a call to arms for a revolution that had, in fact, already begun in Massachusetts, but had yet to rally all colonists to the cause. Volumes have been written on the subject of the struggle between England and America. Men of all ranks have embarked in the controversy, from different motives, and with various designs; but all have been ineffectual, and the period of debate is closed. Arms as a last resource decide the contest; the appeal was the choice of the King, and the Continent has accepted the challenge. . . .25 ’Tis repugnant to reason, to the universal order of things, to all examples from the former ages, to suppose, that this continent can longer remain subject to any external power. The most sanguine in Britain does not think so. The utmost stretch of human wisdom cannot, at this time, compass a plan short of separation, which can promise the continent even a year’s security. Reconciliation is now a falacious dream. Nature hath deserted the connexion, and Art cannot supply her place. For, as Milton wisely expresses, “never can true reconcilement grow where wounds of deadly hate have pierced so deep.”26 Every quiet method for peace hath been ineffectual. Our prayers have been rejected with disdain; and only tended to convince us, that nothing flatters vanity, or confirms obstinacy in Kings more than repeated petitioning—and nothing hath contributed more than that very measure to make the Kings of Europe absolute: Witness Denmark and Sweden. Wherefore, since nothing but blows will do, for God’s sake, let us come to a final separation, and not leave the next generation to be cutting throats, under the violated unmeaning names of parent and child.27 The progressive historians were not about to let the early historians write the definitive history of the pamphleteers, printers, and newspaper publishers, despite the fact that the early historians were obviously closest to the actual events. The problem for the progressives was that the early historians tell the story of the revolution and America’s founding in which the principles and ideas of Western enlightenment—individual, economic, and political liberty—lead to a mass movement, indeed a revolution. For America’s beginning must be either reinterpreted to accommodate the progressive ideological project, or denounced as a fraud and a sham perpetrated by self-serving commercial interests. Indeed, as Humphrey explains, over time, later historians provided different explanations of American history that parted from the early historians and their patriotic view of the role of the press. For example, she writes that “[a]fter 1900 [progressive] historians presented a new interpretation of American history. In an era concerned with inequities and the lack of unity in American society in the twentieth century, the progressive historians emphasized the presence of conflict from the initial settlement of the colonies down to the present. Most of the disagreements and arguments occurred between different classes of people or geographic sections of the American colonies, but the Revolutionary era represented a period of both internal and external troubles. Divisions existed both between groups within the colonies and between the colonies and Great Britain. In this environment, the press played an important role in encouraging and carrying out a crusade for change. In pushing for alterations in the relationship between the colonies and Great Britain, the mass media often helped to accentuate the differences and thus helped to make the divisions grow and become worse.”28 But the historical evidence paints a picture of a colonial press that is courageous, vigorous, and openly partisan about America’s principles in promoting and defending the cause and arguments for the revolution—and, in fact, reflecting the remarkable unity of Americans during the revolutionary period. Therefore, the colonial press itself is deplored by subsequent progressive historians—not for its activism but the wrong kind of activism. Humphrey writes: “With a growing interest in the role of economics in history, more recent progressive historians have questioned the motives for the actions of the Revolutionary printers. Several have concluded that most pressmen supported the Patriot cause for reasons of economic survival rather than any strong ideological commitment.”29 Hence, for these progressives, the press was part of a self-interested ruse that successfully bamboozled the masses into risking their livelihoods, lifestyles, and even their lives to go to war against the most powerful military force on the planet. But facts are facts. And the fact is, as Humphrey observes, that “most Americans concluded that the efforts of Patriot newspaper printers to keep readers informed about the war helped ensure ultimate success by boosting people’s morale and rallying Americans to the cause until victory was achieved. . . . For the Patriots involved in the American Revolution, the weekly news sheets published throughout America were an essential part of the fight. By keeping people informed about the war’s progress, newspapers made winning independence possible. . . . Newspapers were essential in the fight to win independence and thus were essential in the creation of the United States.”30 Consequently, the early printers, pamphleteers, and newspaper publishers were truly brave souls—they were patriots, pioneers, and entrepreneurs, both leaders of and reflective of the colonists and their commitment to liberty and revolution. They risked everything to advance and defend an independent nation and civil society based on the ancient truths and observations of Aristotle and later Cicero, among others; the Enlightenment principles and reasoning of John Locke and Montesquieu, among others; and specifically, the moral underpinnings of natural law and natural rights, the unalienable rights of the individual, liberty, equal justice, property rights, freedom of speech, and, yes, freedom of the press—in sum, this is the essence of the Declaration of Independence, the formal proclamation of the united colonies and America’s founding. While asserting their own support for freedom of the press, it is difficult to square the modern media’s progressivism and social activism with the Declaration’s principles, given that every prominent progressive intellectual at the turn of the twentieth century denounced the Declaration as an old and stale way of thinking about society, set in a preindustrialized, largely agrarian culture, thereby emphasizing the individual over the community, personal interests over the general welfare, and limited taxation and government over the government’s need to be a dynamic force, led by experts, in order to better plan and organize society. For similar reasons, the early progressive intellectuals condemned the Constitution’s separation of powers and deference to state sovereignty as conflicting with social engineering and collectivism. In understanding the mentality of the modern media, it is crucial to understand the extent to which progressives reject so much of America’s early history. For example, in 1907, in a Fourth of July address about the Declaration, Woodrow Wilson, a renowned progressive intellectual and historian, then president of Princeton University, and future president of the United States, wrote: It is common to think of the Declaration of Independence as a highly speculative document; but no one can think it so who has read it. It is a strong, rhetorical statement of the grievances against the English government. It does indeed open with the assertion that all men are equal and that they have certain inalienable rights, among them the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It asserts that governments were instituted to secure these rights, and can derive their just powers only from the consent of the governed; and it solemnly declares that “whenever any government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundations on the principles, and organizing its powers in such forms, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.” But this would not afford a general theory of government to formulate policies upon. No doubt we are meant to have liberty, but each generation must form its own conception of what liberty is. No doubt we shall always wish to be given leave to pursue happiness as we will, but we are not yet sure where or by what method we shall find it. That we are free to adjust government to these ends we know. But Mr. Jefferson and his colleagues in the Continental Congress prescribed the law of adjustment for no generations but their own. They left us to say whether we thought the government they had set up was founded on “such principles,” its powers organized in “such forms” as seemed to us most likely to effect our safety and happiness. They did not attempt to dictate the aims and objects of any generation but their own. . . .31 Wilson continued: So far as the Declaration of Independence was a theoretical document, that is its theory. Do we still hold it? Does the doctrine of the Declaration of Independence still live in our principles of action, in the things we do, in the purposes we applaud, in the measures we approve? It is not a question of piety. We are not bound to adhere to the doctrines held by the signers of the Declaration of Independence; we are as free as they were to make and unmake governments. We are not here to worship men or a document. But neither are we here to indulge in a mere theoretical and uncritical eulogy. Every Fourth of July should be a time for examining our standards, our purposes, for determining afresh what principles, what forms of power we think most likely to effect our safety and happiness. That and that alone is the obligation the Declaration lays upon us. It is no fetish; its words lay no compulsion upon the thought of any free man; but it was drawn by men who thought, and it obliges those who receive its benefits to think likewise. . . .”32 Thus the absurdity of the progressive historians and their attempt to hijack and rewrite the history of America’s founding becomes clear. More to the point, it can be fairly said that the modern media and most journalists who share this progressive attitude must also reject the principles of their press forefathers, the founders of the free press who urged rebellion against Britain—although they undoubtedly appreciate their wisdom in establishing a free press. But what has become of freedom of the press? Have today’s newsrooms and journalists lived up to their purposes? THREE THE MODERN DEMOCRATIC PARTY-PRESS HISTORIANS WRITE OF the “party-press era,” roughly from the 1780s to the 1860s, not long after the founding of the United States. What was the party-press era? It was a time when most newspapers aligned themselves with a politician, campaign, or party, and did so openly. As described by California State University associate professor Charles L. Ponce De Leon: “Sparked by divergent plans for the future of the new republic, competing factions emerged within George Washington’s administration and Congress, and by the mid-1790s each faction had established partisan newspapers championing its point of view. These publications were subsidized through patronage, and, though they had a limited circulation, the material they published was widely reprinted and discussed, and contributed to the establishment of the nation’s first political parties, the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans [or Republicans].”1 Ponce De Leon added: “Newspapers like Philip Freneau’s National Gazette, writes the most prominent [Republican] organ, crafted distinctly partisan lenses through which readers were encouraged to view the world. Specializing in gossip, innuendo, and ad hominem attacks, these newspapers sought to make readers fearful about the intentions of their opponents. The strategy was quite effective at arousing support and mobilizing voters to go to the polls—after all, the fate of the republic appeared to be at stake. . . .”2 Virginia Tech associate professor Jim A. Kuypers explains that the Gazette was anti-Federalist and anti–George Washington, and it had the backing of Thomas Jefferson. “Jefferson’s view was that Freneau merely provided balance to John Fenno’s Federalist Gazette of the United States, arguing, ‘The two papers will show you both sides of our politics.’ Freneau later infuriated Washington with an editorial titled ‘The Funeral of George Washington’; that, and his attack on Alexander Hamilton’s economic program, left the National Gazette as an unmistakable mouthpiece of Republican views. Jefferson himself was targeted for equally vicious slanders by journalist James T. Callender, who afflicted politicians of all stripes, including Jefferson’s bete noir Alexander Hamilton and his old friend John Adams. . . .”3 According to University of Virginia professor Peter Onuf, the 1800 presidential election, which saw Jefferson challenging Adams, “reached a level of personal animosity seldom equaled in American politics. The Federalists attacked the fifty-seven-year-old Jefferson as a godless Jacobin who would unleash the forces of bloody terror upon the land. With Jefferson as President, so warned one newspaper, ‘Murder, robbery, rape, adultery, and incest will be openly taught and practiced, the air will be rent with the cries of the distressed, the soil will be soaked with blood, and the nation black with crimes.’ Others attacked Jefferson’s deist beliefs as the views of an infidel who ‘writes aghast the truths of God’s words; who makes not even a profession of Christianity; who is without Sabbaths; without the sanctuary, and without so much as a decent external respect for the faith and worship of Christians.’?”4 “The luckless Adams was ridiculed from two directions,” writes Onuf. “By the Hamiltonians within his own party and by the Jeffersonian-Republicans from the outside. For example, a private letter in which Hamilton depicted Adams as having ‘great and intrinsic defects in his character’ was obtained by Aaron Burr and leaked to the national press. It fueled the Republican attack on Adams as a hypocritical fool and tyrant. His opponents also spread the story that Adams had planned to create an American dynasty by the marriage of one of his sons to a daughter of King George III. According to this unsubstantiated story, only the intervention of George Washington, dressed in his Revolutionary military uniform, and the threat by Washington to use his sword against his former vice president had stopped Adams’s scheme.”5 But it was the presidential campaign of 1828, between President John Quincy Adams and challenger Andrew Jackson, that many consider among the most brutal of the early contests. Once again, the party-press was in the thick of it. As described by the Hermitage website: “By 1828, Jackson was ready to win the White House. First he would suffer through a bruising campaign still recognized today as one of the most malicious in American history. Adams’s supporters accused Jackson of being a military tyrant who would use the presidency as a springboard for his own Napoleonic ambitions of empire. For proof, they brought out every skeleton in Jackson’s closet: his duels and brawls, his execution of troops for desertion, his declaration of martial law in New Orleans, his friendship with Aaron Burr and his invasions of Spanish Florida in 1814 and 1818. . . .”6 “The most painful attack for Jackson, by far, was that on his and Rachel’s character over their marriage. Technically, Rachel was a bigamist and Jackson her partner in it. Adams’s supporters thus judged Jackson as morally unfit to hold the nation’s highest office.” Jackson’s allies “struck back with attacks on corrupt officials in the Adams administration and labeled Adams an elitist who wanted to increase the size and power of government to benefit the aristocracy.”7 But historian Robert Remini observes that the Jacksonians created “a vast, nationwide newspaper system.”8 Kuypers explains that “at the time that ‘newspapers’ emerged as a driving force in American political life, they had little to do with objective news. Quite the contrary, they deliberately reported everything with a political slant, and were intended to be biased. Nor did they hide their purpose: it was in their names, such as the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, or the Arizona Republican. . . . Partisanship was their primary raison d’etre. Editors viewed readers as voters who needed to be guided to appropriate views, then mobilized to vote.”9 In fact, Kuypers asserts, so corrupt was the relationship between the press and Jacksonians that “many editors owed their jobs directly and specifically to the Jacksonians. . . . Jackson himself appointed numerous editors to salaried political positions, including many postmasters, while nationally it is estimated that 50–60 editors had been given plum political jobs. Rewarding political friends was nothing new—the Federalists had appointed nearly 1,000 editors to postmaster positions over a 12-year period—but the Jacksonians transformed an ad hoc approach to appointments to a strategic plan. Under such circumstances, few readers of ‘news’ doubted where a paper stood on a particular position, nor did people think they were receiving objective facts upon which to make reasoned decisions.”10 Historian Harold Holzer describes the impact of party-journalism and its power to influence politics and the electorate in the years before the Civil War: “By the 1850s . . . almost no independent voters were left in America, only Democrats and Whigs (most of whom later became Republicans), and nearly all of them avid readers of newspapers. Kept in a perpetual state of political arousal by journalism, and further stimulated by election cycles that drew voters to the polls several times each year, not just on the first Tuesdays of November, the overwhelming majority regarded politics with a fervor that approached religious awakening, evoking interest characteristic of modern sports or entertainment. With only a few notable exceptions, few unaligned newspapers prospered.”11 Sadly, this sounds quite similar to the media environment today. In point of fact, the party-press is back, and with a vengeance. Of course, there are certain differences between the party-press of old and its present-day incarnation, but there is no denying its reality. While today’s editors and journalists are not on the payroll of the post office or other federal departments, and are not subsidized by political parties, the revolving door of journalists and/or their family members serving primarily in Democratic administrations, Democratic congressional offices, and Democratic campaigns—and vice versa—is a fact. The evidence of a progressive ideological mindset sympathetic to and supportive of the Democratic Party, in which news is “interpreted” or “analyzed” or “given context,” and where “social activism” is an essential and overarching framework for reporting, results in writing and broadcasting that mainly conform to the objectives, policies, and principles of the modern Democratic Party and the progressive agenda. Importantly, unlike the early party-press era, where newspapers lined up fairly evenly behind one party or the other or one candidate or the other, and transparently proclaimed their partisanship, the current party-press also differs in that news outlets are overwhelmingly supportive of the Democratic Party and hostile to the Republican Party—particularly conservatives—and, these days, virulently antagonistic to President Donald Trump, his supporters, and his policies. Indeed, on January 15, 2018, veteran newsman and columnist Andrew Malcolm summed up “the current sad state of American political journalism” as so thoroughly and obviously anti-Trump that it has inflamed and balkanized the public. In his opinion piece, titled “Media’s Anti-Trump Addiction Amps Up the Outrage and Fuels the Public’s Suspicion,” Malcolm observes that “much of today’s political journalism has fallen into advocacy, intentionally inflammatory, using or omitting selective details, quotes and background to make a case against President Donald Trump. The criticism generally centers on something he did or said he would do—or something someone, usually unidentified, said he might do or is considering possibly doing. And then in a kind of Kabuki dance, journalists run to gather reaction from waiting opponents who provide a predictably outraged quote calling for counteraction.”12 When media outlets and journalists conduct themselves this way, they “den[y] Americans a set of generally-accepted facts to debate,” writes Malcolm, “merely providing fodder for an anti-Trump agenda and more argumentative ammo for both sides. . . . The Washington media rightly claim the duty to check presidential statements. Unfortunately, they couldn’t find the time or inclination to apply the same regimen to former President Obama’s words as they have imposed on Trump’s. Otherwise, Obama would have been called out for the 36 times he promised we could keep our doctor and health plan, the countless specious claims that al Qaeda was on the run, the false suggestion that Russia was no longer a strategic competitor and the laughable claim that his administration experienced no scandal during its 2,922 days.”13 When reporting on a Democratic president and his progressive agenda, the same newsrooms and reporters take a very different approach. “That’s because,” writes Malcolm, “the D.C. media, by and large, sympathized with Obama’s election and policies. And while the election of an African American was historic, it was not the historically shocking upset that Trump’s base delivered to him—and us. An upset that far too many political journalists have been unable to digest and have allowed to corrupt their professionalism. . . .”14 Moreover, press reports are filled with headlines and breaking news akin to supermarket tabloids. The public is subjected to daily if not hourly hype about “news” reports and “alerts” often based on wishful thinking, speculation, partisan advocacy, anonymous sources, and outright inaccuracies. Virtually anyone with a gripe against President Trump is treated as a newsmaker and repeatedly provided multiple national media formats and platforms to air their criticisms. The list is too long and the examples too numerous to reproduce here, but a few will suffice: Porn actress Stormy Daniels and her attorney Michael Avenatti, who was recently charged with multiple felonies by prosecutors in New York and Los Angeles, became overnight media stars and appeared endlessly on news programs and in news reports; reality personality Omarosa Onee Manigault Newman, a disgruntled former White House staffer who was removed from her government job, was given numerous media platforms to promote her “tell-all” book about the Trump White House; Michael Wolff, whose writing was filled with references to anonymous interviews and questionable claims, was given numerous media platforms to promote his “tell-all” book about the Trump White House; Bob Woodward, whose writing was also filled with references to anonymous interviews, which earned public denials by present and former White House staff, was given numerous media platforms to promote his “tell-all” book about the Trump White House; and so on. And there is the endless press drumbeat about—or more like cheerleading for—President Trump’s imminent demise. As the Free Beacon’s Matthew Continetti put it: “The litany has been repeated so often that it’s easy to recite: The walls are closing in on Donald Trump, person x or y or z is going to bring him down, it’s only a matter of time before he is caught or exposed or loses his base of support and driven from public life. The phrases sound out from our cable channels. We see them in newspaper headlines and in our Twitter timelines. This time Trump has gone too far. The end is near. Take that, Drumpf!”15 The press has been campaigning alongside Democratic politicians, officials, consultants, and surrogates for President Trump’s impeachment since even before his nomination. Jennifer Harper of the Washington Times has commented that “the press mulled the impeachment of President Trump even before he became the Republican nominee for president. That is a rough guide to how long the ‘I-word’ has been floated before the public. ‘Could Trump be impeached shortly after he takes office?’ asked Politico. ‘Impeachment is already on the lips of pundits, newspaper editorials, constitutional scholars, and even a few members of Congress.’ The date of that report was April 17, 2016; Mr. Trump only became the official nominee on July 19 of that year. . . . Journalists continue to bandy about the term with gusto, then posture on-camera like it’s a foregone conclusion. Many appear convinced that if they package impeachment speculation like fact enough, the American public will believe that the president should be shamed, blamed, defamed and shown the door. Democrats reinforce the effort with appropriate commentary, even as the persuasive press offers only scanty coverage of Mr. Trump’s authentic accomplishments.”16 In fact, on one day in August 2018, the Media Research Center analyzed an eighteen-hour period on CNN and MSNBC and found that reporters, anchors, and paid contributors used the word “impeachment” an incredible 222 times. “MRC analysts examined all CNN and MSNBC coverage between 6:00 a.m. and 11:59 p.m. on August 22, counting every use of the word ‘impeach,’ ‘impeachment,’ or some permutation thereof. Analysts found 114 instances of the term on MSNBC and 108 on CNN, for a total of 222 total uses of the word.”17 Now impeachment is reported as a foregone conclusion, with a long line of anti-Trump Democratic members of Congress, college professors, former Watergate prosecutors, Never Trumpers, etc., carefully chosen as news guests and commentators to provide the patina of “expert” opinion and “objective” analysis for President Trump’s impeachment. There was also nonstop media speculation about, indeed advocacy for, the indictment of President Trump by either the special counsel, Robert Mueller, or now the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York (SDNY), for a laundry list of supposed violations. Might the president be indicted for obstruction of justice resulting from his firing of former FBI director James Comey; his discussion with Comey about retired lieutenant general Michael Flynn; allegations in a discredited dossier funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee; a meeting at Trump Tower about which the president was unaware; alleged campaign violations said to result from nondisclosure agreements with Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal; etc.? Of course, two Department of Justice (DOJ) memoranda, initially dating back nearly half a century, explicitly provide that the official position of the DOJ is that a sitting president cannot be indicted. The Special Counsel’s Office was—and the SDNY is—bound by those memoranda as a matter of DOJ regulation. Therefore, the constant reporting—“analysis” and “interpretation”—seems intended by the Democratic party-press to build political and public support for the president’s impeachment. Indeed, in the end, Mueller found no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, and he did not seek any charges for obstruction of justice. More on this later.18 But even the tone of the press in reporting on President Trump has reached a level of invective rarely seen in politics. The president is repeatedly referred to or impliedly compared to a fascist dictator, neo-Nazi, white supremacist, racist, Hitler, Stalin, or Mussolini in various news outlets and on media platforms by their journalists, paid commentators, and invited guests. These unhinged and shameful characterizations and rants are so numerous, they are easily searchable and profuse on the internet. However, a generous sampling, compiled by the Media Research Center, is sufficient to prove the point: • When Trump “goes out there and whips people up, it’s like a Mussolini rally. And yes, that’s what I said.”—MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, 3/12/18 • “[I]t’s our responsibility to call out those times when constitutional norms are being challenged, those times when the president of the United States actually channels Joseph Stalin and calls the media ‘the enemy of the people.’?”—MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, 3/8/18 • “Donald Trump talks like a racist, thinks like a racist, makes statements like a racist. Conjures emotions that give succor and support to white supremacists and white nationalists. . . . He has emboldened white supremacists to come forward.”—MSNBC political analyst Michael Eric Dyson, 7/5/2018 • “Our president is a disturbed person, and he’s behaving in ways that are simply inexplicable. . . .”—New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, 2/21/18 • “The world witnessed a betrayal the likes of which we’ve never seen. America’s president sided with its enemy today.”—CNN host Chris Cuomo, 7/16/18 • “[T]he spirit of what Trump did is clearly treasonous. It’s a betrayal of the United States. He threw our U.S. intelligence services, flushed them away and it came off as being a puppet of Putin. . . . [P]eople are going to say there’s the taint of treason around this White House.”—CNN contributor Douglas Brinkley, 7/17/18 • “Well, if anybody is issuing demented words of violence and death, I would say it’s the president of the United States. I mean it’s quite a pass we’ve come to when the leadership of a country like Iran seems more stable and rational than the president of the United States.”—CNN analyst Max Boot, 7/23/18 • “We got a guy [Trump] who gets up every morning and excretes the feces of his moral depravity into a nation he has turned into a psychic commode. That’s what he’s done. And he’s a bigot-in-chief and a racist in residence. . . . Look at this mendacious, relentlessly lying, bigoted, ill-informed person that we have.”—MSNBC political analyst Michael Eric Dyson, 6/4/18 • “I don’t think he’s [Trump] capable of the basic empathies that we feel as human beings, and that’s what a sociopath is.”—MSNBC guest Donny Deutsch, 3/12/18 • “This is not the party of Lincoln, the party of Nixon, or even the party of Reagan. This is the party of [Birth of a Nation film director] D. W. Griffith, this is the party of the KKK, and the party of Trump.”—SiriusXM host Karen Hunter on MSNBC’s Deadline, 2/26/18 • “Article III in Section Three of the Constitution says this: ‘treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war against them or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.’ So, no president has ever been charged with treason. Douglas, do you believe the president’s actions fall anywhere within that definition?”—CNN host Don Lemon, 7/17/18 • “That is just the emboldening of white bigotry by a white nationalist, white supremacist presidency, and his cronies . . . and all the other white nationalists that he has empowered. . . . The emboldening of sort of your random white bigots and then the loosening of the grips on white terrorism in this country has raised the stakes for all of us.”—MSNBC guest Jason Johnson, 7/29/18 • “?‘What does Putin have on Trump? Has Trump been compromised?’ All of those people, those experts, those reporters, they are looking at the fact pattern and seeing something strange, even sinister.”—CNN host Brian Stelter, 7/22/18 • “[I]t is astonishing how he [Trump] has become such an effective and destructive virus created by Vladimir Putin.”—Former Time editor Walter Isaacson, 7/23/18 • “He’s inciting, through mass rallies and constantly lying, fervor in a political base. He scapegoats minority populations and affixes blame to them for every problem the country faces. He alleges conspiracies of nefarious forces. . . . [This] could be straight out of Munich circa 1928.”—MSNBC contributor Steve Schmidt, 6/26/18 • Under Trump, “[c]hildren are being marched away to showers, just like the Nazis said they were taking people to the showers, and then they never came back.”—MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, 6/15/18 • Trump’s detention centers at the border: “I call this a concentration camp for kids because that’s exactly what it’s turning out to [be].”—MSNBC analyst Michael Steele, 6/15/18 • Trump “has very deliberately set up the press as the enemy of the people. . . . You know, this is something that we first heard from Joseph Stalin. This is very dangerous. It undercuts democracy.”—NBC News correspondent Andrea Mitchell, 7/30/18 • Trumps’ administration follows “the exact pattern that Hitler has—I hate to say it—with the propaganda, even down to the Red Cross went into Auschwitz. They cleaned it up for two days—it looked fine—they went back—they said everything seems fine there. . . . To quote that new book that just came out, he is evil. He is evil.”—MSNBC producer Michele Reiner, 6/24/18 • Trump “is completely detached from reality. . . . [P]eople close to him say is mentally unfit, that people close to him during the campaign told me had early stages of dementia.”—MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, 11/30/17 • “Donald Trump is a racist. He isn’t just a white supremacist—he’s a flat-out, full racist. . . .”—former New York Times reporter David Cay Johnston, 9/16/17 • “If you vote for Trump, then you, the voter, you, not Donald Trump, are standing at the border like Nazis going ‘you here, you here.’ . . . It’s a given, the evilness of Donald Trump.”—MSNBC guest Donny Deutsch, 6/18/18 • “This whole administration . . . These guys are terrorists, right? . . . [A] white nationalist government that will take children hostage to get what they want.”—MSNBC guest Jason Johnson, 6/17/18 • “This is the time for the Democratic base to roar up and say no more of this crap! . . . This is time for vengeance for what happened two years ago.”—MSNBC host Chris Matthews, 6/27/18 • “He will be forever remembered as the president who traumatized little children. That’s his brand now. He’s the president, who purposefully traumatized babies and children and he traumatized them for his political gain or to look like Kim Jong-un.”—MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski, 6/18/18 • Under Trump, “[w]e can imagine a future of jackboots crashing through our doors at 2 a.m., trucks in the streets to take people to the internment camps, bright lights and barking dogs—and worse.”—Politico chief political columnist, Roger Simon, 2/1/17 • “Do citizens in dictatorships recognize what’s happening right here, right now? Are they looking at the first two days of the Trump administration and saying, ‘Oh, that’s what my leader does?’?”—CNN host Brian Stelter, 1/22/17 • “Is it time for newsrooms to think of new ways to convey Trump’s lack of credibility? . . . Because he says so many things that are bogus. . . . He tells us all these lies, he spreads all these falsehoods.”—CNN host Brian Stelter, 8/26/18 • “Trump’s attacks on the American press as ‘enemies of the American people’ are more treacherous than Richard Nixon’s attacks on the press. . . . There’s a history of what ‘enemy of the people,’ that phrase means as used by dictators and authoritarians including Stalin, including Hitler.”—CNN commentator Carl Bernstein, 2/19/17 • Trump is “not only not fit to be president. In my book, his lack of empathy, his lack of leadership, his lack of courage, he’s unfit to be human.”—CNN commentator Ana Navarro, 8/14/17 • “We haven’t had a president this psychologically troubled in this way since at least Richard Nixon.”—former CBS News anchor Dan Rather, 6/1/17 • Trump is “the chief recruiter and Dear Leader of a gang of domestic terrorists. . . . The president is the most powerful hate-monger in America. He is the imperial wizard of the new white supremacy. . . . He is our first neo-Nazi president.”—New Republic contributing editor Bob Moser, 8/14/17 • Trump is “a sort of junior player in a block of authoritarian countries. . . . He’s part of the block that includes Vladimir Putin, Duterte, he’s you know, he’s kind of part of kind of an Axis Power. . . . He’d certainly like to” murder people without due process.—American Prospect senior correspondent Michelle Goldberg, 8/17/18 • “We have a dangerous individual in the Oval Office who is a national security threat, and he needs to be removed from office. . . . He’s unfit, and he needs to be removed.”—MSNBC contributor Ron Reagan Jr., 5/22/17 • “He’s unhinged, it’s embarrassing. . . .”—CNN host Don Lemon, 8/22/17 • “We live in the age of the active shooter and the president is goading them. He is inciting them. . . . The blood will be on his hands the moment some whack-job thinks that he’s carrying out the instructions of a president and goes into a newsroom like the one behind us or the one in my news organization or yours and murdered people.”—New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, 8/6/18 • “It’s hard to fire your son-in-law . . . but Mussolini had a great solution to that. He had him executed. . . . So, if I were Jared [Kushner], I’d be a little careful.”—MSNBC host Chris Matthews, 1/20/17 • “There are a variety of ways that Trump could kill us all.”—MTV correspondent Jamil Smith • “The party of Lincoln has become the party of Charlottesville, Arpaio, DACA repeal and the Muslim ban. Embodying the very worst sentiments and driven by irrational anger, it deserves not defense but extinction.”—Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin, 9/4/17 • “People are saying we have to talk about his health now before it’s too late. Eugene Robinson saying: ‘How long are we going to pretend that President Trump is fully rational? How long are we going to ignore the signs he’s dangerously out of control?’ . . . That’s the question. I’m going to ask you, Jeff Greenfield. Is now the time?”—CNN host Brian Stelter, 12/3/17 • “How Murderer Charles Manson and Donald Trump Used Language to Gain Followers”—Newsweek headline, 11/20/17 • “This is not a political party [Republicans]—this is a domestic terror group.”—MSNBC guest Fernand Amandi, 11/26/17 • “How surprised should we be? This is at least the fourth mass killing in America using an AR-15 since the Las Vegas massacre. . . . At the center, an unapologetically incendiary president untrammeled by traditional norms of civility.”—ABC This Week’s host George Stephanopoulos, 10/28/18 • “And I think what he [Trump] has done over the course of the last few years is help foment this” violence.—New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd on ABC’s This Week, 10/28/18 • “The president is obviously a racist, he’s obviously a demagogue. He obviously condones anti-Semitism, stokes up nationalist hatred.”—NBC and MSNBC national affairs analyst John Heilemann, 10/29/18 • “I can’t even call him president, this demagogue, this nationalist.”—MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, 10/29/1819 This media-pack malevolency toward President Trump and his party belies the press’s self-serving claims of professionalism and high standards; rather, it is every bit as tawdry, or worse, then the party-press “journalism” of the early 1800s, which they claim to frown upon. Indeed, during the Trump presidency, the press has engaged in lies, distortions, sloppiness, and overall malpractice to an extent previously unseen in modern times. At one point, the DailyWire kept a weekly tab of false media stories;20 The Federalist had its own list;21 ex–CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson maintains a running list of “media mistakes” during the Trump era;22 the Daily Caller kept a compilation of media “screw-ups” involving the Trump-Russia story; etc. A particularly notorious and pervasive illustration of press transgressions occurred on January 17, 2019, when BuzzFeed posted a headline screaming, “President Trump Directed His Attorney Michael Cohen to Lie to Congress About the Moscow Tower Project.” The subheadline declared, “Trump received 10 personal updates from Michael Cohen and encouraged a planned meeting with Vladimir Putin.” The crux of the story was that President Trump had directed Michael Cohen, his former lawyer and current felon, to lie to Congress about a real estate development in Moscow that, ultimately, never happened. BuzzFeed reported that “President Donald Trump directed his longtime attorney Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about negotiations to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, according to two federal law enforcement officials involved in an investigation of the matter. Trump also supported a plan, set up by Cohen, to visit Russia during the presidential campaign, in order to personally meet President Vladimir Putin and jump-start the tower negotiations. ‘Make it happen,’ the sources said Trump told Cohen. And even as Trump told the public he had no business deals with Russia, the sources said Trump and his children Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr. received regular, detailed updates about the real estate development from Cohen, whom they put in charge of the project.”23 “Now,” BuzzFeed stated, “the two [anonymous law enforcement] sources have told BuzzFeed News that Cohen also told the special counsel that after the election, the president personally instructed him to lie—by claiming that negotiations ended months earlier than they actually did—in order to obscure Trump’s involvement. The special counsel’s office learned about Trump’s directive for Cohen to lie to Congress through interviews with multiple witnesses from the Trump Organization and internal company emails, text messages, and a cache of other documents. Cohen then acknowledged those instructions during his interviews with that office.”24 For an entire day, news outlets and journalists breathlessly repeated the “breaking” BuzzFeed story. Some provided the occasional caveat “if the story is true,” a throwaway line meaning that while they could not or, more likely, would not bother to independently verify the accuracy of the story, they would repeat it anyway. Indeed, the story was not merely blared to the public with repeated headlines and extensive coverage, but the “news” story was imbued with wild speculation about the implications for the president. Again, a conga line of congressional Democrats, former federal prosecutors, and other “experts” were paraded through newsrooms and appeared on telecasts claiming this was the bombshell that would result in President Trump’s impeachment, if not secret and sealed indictment, speculating the president had committed obstruction of justice, etc.25 The Daily Caller reviewed television clippings from the Grabien news service and reported that “personalities on CNN and MSNBC used the words ‘impeach,’ ‘impeachment,’ or ‘impeachable’ 179 times” in less than one day of broadcasts.”26 NewsBusters reported that “[d]espite the fact that the BuzzFeed News story was not confirmed by . . . any news outlet . . . , the [NBC, ABC, and CBS] broadcast networks devoted 27 minutes and 33 seconds on their Friday morning and evening newscasts (minus opening teases)” to the story. Of course, “[a]ll three networks pointed to the questionable veracity of the BuzzFeed piece . . . to some degree,” but they repeated the story nonetheless.27 After several days of this, the special counsel’s office finally issued a statement denying the story. “Buzzfeed’s description of specific statements to the Special Counsel’s Office, and characterization of documents and testimony obtained by this office, regarding Michael Cohen’s Congressional testimony are not accurate.”28 Perhaps as objectional, if not more so, is the drive to smear President Trump as mentally unfit and malignantly unbalanced to hold office, in which his political opponents, helped by a cabal of “mental health experts” and an eager news media, invoke the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to the Constitution as a legal basis and option for removing him from office. This is perhaps the most inflammatory, scurrilous, and pernicious allegation that can be made against a mentally healthy individual, but especially a president of the United States, as the purpose is to destroy his reputation with the public and foreign leaders and make governing as difficult as possible. Consequently, this, too, requires exploration. For example, on July 3, 2017, NBC News posted uncritically this story: “House Democrats are on a mission to educate the American people about a little-known power of the 25th Amendment—the ousting of the president. . . . Led by freshman Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, a group of growing Democratic co-signers has put forth a bill that could force President Donald Trump from office if he were found mentally or physically unfit.” NBC continued: “Although it was introduced in April, the bill has gained steam in the past week as Trump’s tweet storms have grown in ferocity. . . . ‘Given Donald Trump’s continued erratic and baffling behavior, is it any wonder why we need to pursue this legislation?’?” asked Representative Darren Soto, Democrat of Florida, a cosigner. “The mental and physical health of the leader of the United States and the free world is a matter of great public concern.”29 These Democratic politicians were partly influenced by twenty-seven psychiatrists, psychologists, and mental health practitioners who met in March 2017 at what they labeled the “Duty to Warn” conference at Yale University to assess President Trump’s mental health. The meeting was led by Professor Bandy X. Lee, M.D. The “experts” considered two questions: “What’s wrong with him?” and “Does professional responsibility include a duty to warn the public if they believe the president is dangerously unfit for office?” On October 3, 2017, they released their conclusions in a book titled The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump and summarized their position as follows: “There are those who still hold out hope that this president can be prevailed upon to listen to reason and curb his erratic behavior. Our professional experience would suggest otherwise. . . . Collectively with our coauthors, we warn that anyone as mentally unstable as Mr. Trump simply should not be entrusted with the life-and-death powers of the presidency.”30 It is revealing that in the book’s prologue, Lee and Dr. Judith Lewis Herman disclose that “[s]oon after the presidential election of 2016, alarmed by the apparent mental instability of the president-elect, we both separately circulated letters among some of our professional colleagues, expressing our concern.” Thus their quest to alert the world to Donald Trump’s alleged mental instability began immediately after his successful election over Hillary Clinton. The various essays in the book were written by different authors, each assigned a chapter with titles such as “Unbridled and Extreme Present Hedonism: How the Leader of the Free World Has Proven Time and Again He Is Unfit for Duty”; “Pathological Narcissism and Politics: A Lethal Mix”; “Sociopathy”; “Donald Trump is: (A) Bad, (B) Mad, (C) All of the Above”; “Cognitive Impairment, Dementia, and POTUS”; “A Clinical Case for the Dangerousness of Donald J. Trump”; “Trump Anxiety Disorder: The Trump Effect on the Mental Health of Half the Nation and Special Populations”; “In Relationship with an Abusive President”; “Trump’s Daddy Issues: A Toxic Mix for America”; “Who Goes Trump? Tyranny as a Triumph of Narcissism”; “He’s Got the World in His Hands and His Finger on the Trigger: The Twenty-Fifth Amendment Solution.”31 On January 3, 2018, Lee and congressional Democrats (and one Republican senator) met in secret. Politico reported: “Lawmakers concerned about President Trump’s mental state summoned Yale University psychiatry professor Dr. Bandy X. Lee to Capitol Hill last month for two days of briefings about his recent behavior. In private meetings with more than a dozen members of Congress held on December 5 and 6, Lee briefed lawmakers. . . . Her professional warning to Capitol Hill: ‘He’s going to unravel, and we are seeing the signs.’?”32 The Democratic party-press was more than happy to use this slander against the president. In addition to Lee sitting for a number of interviews, the “mental illness” mantra was further employed by the press. For example, on January 3, 2018, “NBC anchor Peter Alexander asked White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders if Americans should be ‘concerned about the president’s mental fitness’ after he tweeted that he has a bigger nuclear ‘button’ than [North Korea’s dictator] Kim has. . . . Anchors and pundits on CNN began questioning Trump’s mental stability, with media reporter Brian Stelter questioning whether the president had descended into ‘madness.’?”33 Concocting charges of mental illness backed by a relative handful of psychiatrists, psychologists, and mental health practitioners would be an extremely dangerous precedent and abuse of the Constitution if used as a basis for invoking the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. Apart from the vile allegations of mental unfitness against President Trump, discussed for months in the press, few news outlets bothered to explain, adequately or otherwise, the purpose of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, ratified in 1967, how it works, and how politically complicated and constitutionally impracticable such an endeavor would be even under the right circumstances. Section 4 of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment states: “Whenever the vice president and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as acting president.” The president has the right to challenge these actions, which, in the end, requires a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress to sustain.34 That was never going to happen. Therefore, the real purpose in this case appears to be to personally humiliate and politically damage President Trump. President Trump is not the first Republican to be targeted with politically charged claims of mental instability. In 1964, Senator Barry Goldwater was the Republican nominee for president, running against President Lyndon Johnson. Goldwater was also a conservative leader and, therefore, considered a political outsider. In September–October 1964, Fact magazine ran an entire issue on Goldwater’s alleged mental unfitness for the Oval Office. It started with the title, “1,189 Psychiatrists Say Goldwater Is Psychologically Unfit to Be President!—The Unconscious of a Conservative: A Special Issue on the Mind of Barry Goldwater.” The editor and publisher, Ralph Ginzburg, wrote, in part: “Mr. Goldwater’s illness is not just an emotional maladjustment, or a mild neurosis, or a queerness. As emphatically stated by many of the leading psychiatrists in this country, the pattern of his behavior is ominous. From his sadistic childhood pranks to his cruel practical jokes today, from his nervous breakdowns under pressure in his twenties to his present-day withdrawals and escapes in time of crisis, from his obsessive pre-occupation with firearms in his youth to his present fantasies about brandishing nuclear weapons to scare his enemies, from his conviction that he is surrounded by deadly enemies at home—whether [labor leader Walter] Reuther, [Nelson] Rockefeller, the American Press, or Someone Who Is Out to Kill Him—to his belief that every Russian ballerina is a spy, he shows unmistakable symptoms of paranoia. . . . Clearly, paranoia is not just any mental disease. In a leader who commands the most powerful nation and the most destructive arsenal in history it constitutes nothing short of mortal danger to mankind. A little over 30 years ago a paranoiac with a charismatic effect on his audiences, supported by an extremist, highly patriotic group, was democratically elected to the highest executive position in the government of his country. His name was Adolph Hitler.”35 The magazine explained that it sent a questionnaire to all of the nation’s 12,356 psychiatrists asking, “Do you believe Barry Goldwater is psychologically fit to serve as President of the United States.” “In all, 2,417 psychiatrists responded. Of these, 571 said they did not know enough about Goldwater to answer the question; 657 said they thought Goldwater was psychologically fit; and 1,189 said that he was not. . . .” Fact also solicited comments from psychiatrists and published a “sampling,” which it claimed “constitute the most intensive character analysis ever made of a living human being.”36 Needless to say, the published comments were vicious. As a result of the Fact article, in 1973 the American Psychiatric Association (APA) issued what became know as the “Goldwater Rule”: “On occasion, psychiatrists are asked for an opinion about an individual who is in the light of public attention or who has disclosed information about himself/herself through public media. In such circumstances, a psychiatrist may share with the public his or her expertise about psychiatric issues in general. However, it is unethical for a psychiatrist to offer a professional opinion unless he or she has conducted an examination and has been granted proper authorization for such a statement.”37 Nonetheless, the Goldwater Rule did not stop the psychobabble and public maligning of President Trump by the psychiatrists and others who had gathered at Yale and penned their book. Nor did it deter the Democratic party-press from fully and excitedly exploiting it. In fact, the media have gone even further. Donald Trump’s supporters are even targeted for mental evaluation. On September 23, 2016, Bobby Azarian, Ph.D., “a cognitive neuroscientist affiliated with George Mason University and a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, BBC Future, Scientific American, Slate, The Huffington Post, Quartz, and others,” wrote in Psychology Today that “[t]he only thing that might be more perplexing than the psychology of Donald Trump is the psychology of his supporters. In their eyes, The Donald can do no wrong. Even Trump himself seems to be astonished by this phenomenon. . . .” Azarian, therefore, will undertake the superhuman task of psychoanalyzing tens of millions of the president’s supporters from his lofty media perch at Psychology Today. “So how exactly are Trump loyalists psychologically or neurologically different from everyone else? What is going on in their brains that makes them so blindly devoted?”38 Azarian argues there are four possibilities: “1. The Dunning-Kruger Effect: Some believe that many of those who support Donald Trump do so because of ignorance—basically they are underinformed or misinformed about the issues at hand. . . . 2. Hypersensitivity to Threat: Science has unequivocally shown that the conservative brain has an exaggerated fear response when faced with stimuli that may be perceived as threatening. . . . These brain responses are automatic, and not influenced by logic or reason. . . . Fear keeps [Trump’s] followers energized and focused on safety. 3. Terror Management Theory: [W]hen people are reminded of their own mortality, which happens with fear mongering, they will more strongly defend those who share their worldviews and national or ethnic identity, and act out more aggressively towards those who do not. . . . By constantly emphasizing existential threat, Trump creates a psychological condition that makes the brain respond positively rather than negatively to bigoted statements and divisive rhetoric. 4. High Attention Engagement: . . . Essentially, the loyalty of Trump supporters may in part be explained by America’s addiction with entertainment and reality TV. . . . He keeps us on the edge of our seat, and for that reason, some Trump supporters will forgive anything he says. They are happy as long as they are kept entertained.39” Azarian assures us that “these explanations do not apply to all Trump supporters. In fact, some are likely intelligent people who know better, but are supporting Trump to be rebellious or to introduce chaos into the system. They may have such distaste for the establishment and Hillary Clinton that their vote for Trump is a symbolic middle finger directed at Washington.”40 Azarian’s disdainful attitude about Trump and his supporters is typical and widespread throughout newsrooms. The Democratic party-press is incurious about and even blind to objective truth and the reality that surrounds them. On November 11, 2016, shortly after Donald Trump’s election, Will Rahn, CBS News digital political correspondent and the network’s managing director of politics, wrote an extraordinary opinion-piece, “The Unbearable Smugness of the Press,” in which he excoriated the Democratic party-press and fellow journalists. Here is part of what he said: The mood in the Washington press corps is bleak, and deservedly so. It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that, with a few exceptions, we were all tacitly or explicitly