When the Press Is Just as Guilty of “Election Interference”

President Donald Trump’s belief that “the press is the enemy of the people” has resonated extensively with his base. Although this has inspired much consternation among the news media’s defenders, a President of the United States admonishing an unscrupulous press is hardly without historical precedent in the United States. Choosing just one example among many, President Theodore Roosevelt (who was largely considered to be an ally to the profession of journalism) used the image of the muckraker to describe writers who focused overwhelmingly on the negative. In doing so, President Roosevelt also conveyed his disdain for “sensational, lurid and untruthful articles.” While I do not personally agree with President Trump’s general assessment of the media (and I also believe that President Trump actually desires a press that is steeped in Roosevelt’s ideas of fairness and transparency), it is so clear that certain media outlets—particularly of the cable news variety—are surely little more than a sworn enemy of President Trump’s. And, underscoring this point, CNN, for instance, is widely viewed as almost explicitly an anti-Trump network.

Self-professed liberal guardians of democracy at left-leaning news organizations believe that President Trump is a threat to American democracy. Moreover, they claim that in 2016, Russian operatives—working covertly—tampered with the American election process by “harming the campaign of Hillary Clinton, boosting the candidacy of Donald Trump, and increasing political and social discord in the United States.” The hacking that journalists refer to generally describes the use of fake accounts on social media to post divisive content so as to influence public opinion. Now, Americans are being told again by many in the media that the Russians are at it in 2020, as well as that efforts to undermine the presidential election of 2020 are underway. Be that as it may, there is more than one way to tamper with an election: Under the pretense of serious journalism, many unscrupulous individuals in the news media are implementing their own version of election tampering and are “hacking” the electorate by making outrageous claims, with little to no sourcing whatsoever. Perhaps the most striking example of this is Jeffrey Goldberg’s recent piece in The Atlantic, entitled “Trump: Americans Who Died in War Are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers.'”

This is nothing more than an example of pure propaganda published with bad intent and printed for the political betterment of a journalist’s preferred political candidate. The article, to this point, is replete with preposterous and unverified claims alleging that President Trump holds disdain towards war veterans, who sacrificed their lives for the United States. Goldberg claims that President Trump “canceled a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris in 2018” because he “feared his hair would become disheveled in the rain.” Additionally, in Goldberg’s telling, President Trump chose not to visit the cemetery that contained the bodies of “1,800 Marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood” because the cemetery was, in the President’s view, filled with ”losers” and “suckers.” Since they did not apparently have the wherewithal to survive the battle, President Trump viewed their having died as a personal shortcoming.