This past week, the nation’s newspapers took collective umbrage at being called “the enemy of the people” by President Trump.
“That is what Nazis called Jews,” gasped the editors of the Kansas City Star. “A form even appeared in Nazi Germany, when Jewish people were called an ‘enemy of the state,’” fretted the editors of the Topeka Capital-Journal.
These being the only two editorials I read, I have to imagine that many more of the roughly 400 protesting newsrooms engaged in some variation on the reductio ad Hitlerum theme. Even if all 400 did, no halfway sentient adult can take this self-indulgence seriously.
Here is why. Since President Trump’s election, every major magazine, every major social media outlet, every major newspaper, just about all of Hollywood and Broadway, and every major TV network save for Fox News have conspired to destroy the president. Against the State: An ... Best Price: $5.02 Buy New $5.52 (as of 11:35 UTC - Details)
During this time, these “journalists” have treated their audiences to an endless stream of anti-Trump propaganda only marginally rooted in the truth, and not a one of them has seen a pink slip, let alone a gas chamber.
If these media outposts have no cause for alarm, Alex Jones does. So does every other right-of-center voice in America. An exchange on comedian Bill Maher’s HBO show Friday suggests why the reductio ad Hitlerum in the title of this essay, if a stretch, is still more justified than those ululated by America’s newspapers.
When Maher explained to his audience that Apple, Google, Facebook, and Spotify colluded to boot Jones and InfoWars from their platforms, most in the audience applauded enthusiastically. More troubling, guest Jennifer Granholm, a former Michigan governor, shouted, “Thank God.”
To his credit, the contrarian Maher scolded the audience. “If you’re a liberal you’re supposed to be for free speech,” he said. “That’s free speech for the speech you hate.” He made little headway with the audience or his guests. If any other prominent liberal voice in the media protested Jones’s exile, he or she or ‘zhe’ has done so sotto voce.
One can argue that the media platforms that evicted Jones were private concerns, but the collusion among them was symptomatic of the nearly universal urge on the left to suppress speech that challenges the left/liberal agenda.
The private enterprise argument cannot be made in the four cases that follow. In these cases, the media conspired with the government to punish individuals whose media efforts threatened Democrats in power. I have met the individuals profiled here in the course of my own work. I am sure there are many more that I have not met who have suffered similar or worse fates.
In 1996, investigative reporter James Sanders was introduced to TWA 747 pilot and manager Terry Stacey by Sanders’s wife Elizabeth, a TWA trainer. Stacey was working on the investigation of TWA 800, the plane that blew up off the coast of Long Island months earlier. “What he told me over those first hours,” said Sanders of his meeting with Stacey, “was one thing — ‘I know there’s a cover-up in progress.’” For a New Liberty: The... Best Price: $9.51 Buy New $10.50 (as of 02:10 UTC - Details)
To confirm his suspicion, Stacey Fedexed Sanders a pinch of foam rubber from a seat back to have it tested for missile residue. Sanders submitted half of it to a west coast lab and gave the other half to a producer at CBS News, Kristina Borjesson, for CBS to test. Borjesson prodded her superiors to review Sanders’s evidence for a missile strike. They refused and returned the foam rubber to the FBI, killing Borjesson’s CBS career in the process.
Eventually the FBI arrested Stacey and both the Sanders on the absurd charge of conspiracy to steal airplane parts. At the time of their trial, it stunned Sanders that none among the media managed to frame even one First Amendment question.
One reporter asked Sanders why he did not immediately return the foam rubber and turn Stacey in to the FBI. Another argued the government line, namely that Sanders was not a journalist entitled to First Amendment protection.