Leonard Pitts Jr plays on the words from one of Shakespeare’s plays: “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”
This Shakespearean line, spoken by the character Dick the Butcher, is a back-handed compliment to lawyers, who may impede tyranny.
Today, Pitts suggests, some are trying to kill all the journalists. (“Trump’s anti-journalism hit squad,” The Seattle Times, Sep 1 2019)
Apparently, a group is targeting journalists unfavorable to President Donald Trump’s administration, searching for any less than admirable episodes in their past lives. The goal is to blacken and render suspect any journalist who writes against the policies of the president.
Trump himself has tweeted against reputable news organizations as “enemies of the people.” He has called The New York Times, winner of over a hundred Pulitzer prizes for excellence in reporting, “an evil propaganda machine.”
Evil propaganda machines certainly exist, mostly the sort who seed the internet with unverifiable rumors. Newspapers who engage in research, who send experienced reporters to the far corners of the earth, and whose reporters sometimes have died to bring the truth to their readers, do not fall in the category of an evil propaganda machine.
Reporting on government, popular and unpopular, is, in fact, the job given the press by the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Press freedom is right up there with freedom of religion and of speech and of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition their government for wrongs done them.
If you want to see what happens to a free press as a democracy is stifled, read an article, in The Economist (“The Entanglement of Powers,” August 32, 2019) about Hungary’s authoritarian leader, Viktor Orban.
Orban has virtually taken over all three branches of Hungary’s government—the executive, the legislative, and the judicial. He has been able to do this in part because his party also controls most of the country’s newspapers, turning them into a propaganda machine for Orban.
Times of change and turmoil, as the world has been in at least since September 11, 2001, tempt people to look for simple solutions. Deep reporting on real issues may conflict with nostalgia for easy answers, but we need it all the more.