We begin with comments
by a distinguished professor of politics at Occidental College followed by some notes from your editor.
Peter
Dreier, Huffington Post, August 2016 -“Sociopathic” might describe Trump’s
condition, but it doesn’t describe our condition as we routinely hear such
Trump statements on the campaign trail.
The only thing that comes close is philosopher Hannah
Arendt’s notion of the “banality of evil.” She coined this phrase in her 1963
book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on
the Banality of Evil, about the trial of Adolph Eichmann, a top
administrator in the machinery of the Nazi death camps, in an Israeli
courtroom. If someone carries out unspeakable crimes often enough, he or she
comes to accept them as “normal.” That was Arendt’s view of Eichmann.
But the “banality of evil” also applies to an entire
society. We can get used to outrageous things — slavery, Jim Crow segregation
laws, massive homelessness, widespread malnutrition, the frequent killing of
black men by police — until we are provoked to view them as unjust.
This is the dilemma now facing Americans — and particularly
American journalists — in thinking about Trump’s presidential campaign. We’ve
become so used to his daily outrages … that we’re almost numb to them. It is
difficult to renew outrage day after day.
It is a matter of what kind of words, and what kind of
behavior, crosses the line so blatantly, and violates whatever standards of
basic decency we have, that it is beyond contempt. But who draws the line? And
what do we do to a public figure who crosses it?
The New York Times’ media critic Jim Rutenberg, in his
analysis, “Trump Is Testing the Norms of Objectivity in Journalism” , did a
good job of examining how difficult it is for the mainstream media, caught in
the web of “he said/she said” reporting and admonitions to be “neutral,” to
deal with Trump’s campaign and his almost daily outrages. Rutenberg wrote:
“If you’re a working journalist and you believe that Donald
J. Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalistic
tendencies, that he cozies up to anti-American dictators and that he would be
dangerous with control of the United States nuclear codes, how the heck are you
supposed to cover him?”
Where is George Orwell when we need him?
Sam Smith – Having
been in this racket for six decades, I’m aware that some things have changed
dramatically for the worse and yet the public and the press regard them as
normal –as Peter Dreier points out, what Hannah Arendt called the banality of
evil.
Among these has been the fading of moral voices – whether
from academia such as Dreier or religions other than the evangelical right. It
is amazing,, for example, that only 25% of Christians are evangelicals – and
not all them right wingers – yet the media has let them have a disproportionate
share of space on issues like abortion and gay rights.
Similarly the media seems immune to the possibility that the
most successful exercises in diplomacy do not typically involve the military.
Nor does it ask when our last successful war was or when was the last war
approved, as required by the Constitution, by the US Congress.
Part of this is because history and cultural context are an
almost trivial part of journalism these days. Among the things you might
otherwise learn is that the banality of political evil is far more bipartisan
these days that it once was.
Yes Lyndon Johnson lied about Vietnam and Kennedy lied about
Cuba but their total lives were much
more complex. It wasn’t until I began looking at the Clinton story during the
1992 campaign that I stumbled not only upon a Democratic version of repeated
fiction but a stunning acceptance of it by liberals and the media that would
continue for a quarter century.
Many
of the things I wrote about Arkansas would never appear in the more
conventional media. I won’t bore you with the details, but how many even today
realize that three of Hillary Clinton’s closest business partners ended up in
prison? Or that Whitewater was, in fact, a real estate scam in which the unwitting bought third rate property 50 miles
from the nearest grocery store and, thanks to the sleazy financing, about half
the purchasers, many of them seniors, lost their property.
Such information was so unacceptable in Washington that for
a period I was banned from DC’s NPR station and on two occasions, my invited
appearances on CSPAN were blocked by higher network officials. To this day, I
have never run into such a collection of good stories for which there was such
stunning disinterest by the media and liberals who should have cared.
I had always thought one of the jobs of a journalist was to
uncover the truth for the public about its leaders. As far back as the 1990s I began to feel a
growing disinterest even by those I thought were in a fellowship of mind.
Then there was the Bush administration with the Iraq War and
it felt more comfortable, for example, to write a piece for Harper’s comprised
entirely of Bush administration and supporters’ lies about the war. But a
decade and a half later, few still seem concerned that we were conned into a
struggle that about which those in power still tell untruths.
And while Obama was, on a day to day basis, more honest than
such predecessors, his underlying story also contained fictions that to this
day seem to interest only a few. For example, he had neither the ethnic
heritage nor the progressive politics for which he was credited. He, in fact,
spent more time at Harvard Law School than he had with a black parent. And
curiously, at a time when discussions of race blossomed, few seemed to notice
that skin color is only one factor in ethnicity. I have long felt that Obama
could have been far more effective and successful if he had presented himself
as America’s first bi-ethnic president, someone who had lived and understood
the complications of a multicultural society.
Add to this the hidden fact that Obama was in part the creation
of the same conservative Democratic Leadership Council that had given us
Clinton and you have another clue as to why something like Obamacare didn’t
work out better.
Then consider the post-Great Society desertion of the white
working class and its economic issues and one begins to sense that this is a
cultural rather than just a political problem.
So if we are to be honest, we must admit that as a society
we have increasingly treated as normal political characteristics we still claim
to abhor. The evil of Donald Trump is not our fault, but our failure to act
loudly and firmly enough against its earlier manifestations made his rise easier.
The media is not helpless to deal with this. It after all
helped to create Trump first by its enthusiasm for his show business
manifestations and then by assisting Americans come to believe that TV show
hosts are a reasonable source of presidents. It also bought heavily into the
Trump lie that running a family business is equivalent to running a normal
large corporation and that in either case selling stuff to customers for your
own profit qualifies you to serve citizens in their best interests.
The media’s job is not merely to report what is happening
and being said but to lend it some rational meaning. If a bridge collapses, you talk to engineers
and not just the people who were on it or the politicians who built it.
Some newspapers are doing a much better job of fact checking
of late but there is little of this on television. The key question is: when
Trump lies, what should you do about it? Reporting lies is not a journalistic responsibility,
pointing out lies is.
And the media needs to take responsibility for the fact that
the people they feature on their pages and on the air easily become voices of
authority and reason to the public. Even in the 1950s and 60s, when you read
the news you found voices of intelligence, morality imagination and clarity
even if they were outside the system. These voices often lack the sort of power
the media respects in part because the media rarely talks to them. How would
CNN cover Martin Luther King Jr if he had arrived on the scene last year?
It’s time to make wisdom, justice and moral understanding at
least as big a part of the news as those who con every microphone they
approach. If the people we hear through the media are mainly hyperbolists,
liars, and other forms of manipulators, where do we get to learn what is sane,
logic and moral?
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