Jack Schaefer Trump Is Making Journalism Great Again
nonfiction
The Never-Ending War Betwixt the White House and the Press
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THE PRESIDENTS VS. THE PRESS
The Countless Battle Between the White House and the Media — From the Founding Fathers to Fake News
By Harold Holzer
The adjacent time President Trump chafes your free-spoken language sensibilities by yanking the White Firm credentials of a reporter who questioned him hard, insulting journalists at a news briefing, tweeting virtually "faux news" being the enemy of the people or threatening to retaliate against i of the media outlets whose reporting has offended him, calm yourself by opening Harold Holzer's "The Presidents vs. the Press" to almost any page. For all of Trump'south transgressions confronting the press — and they are many — Holzer's book offers testify that he's not the greatest enemy of the Get-go Subpoena to accept occupied the White House. He might not even rank in the summit five.
Trump would definitely have to bow to both President John Adams, who signed into police force sedition statutes used to prosecute journalists, and President Abraham Lincoln, who imprisoned scores of editors during the Civil State of war, purged news stories from the telegraph, banned some newspapers from the mails and even confiscated presses. "Altogether, nearly 200 papers would face federally initiated subjugation during the Civil War," Holzer writes. President Theodore Roosevelt, who actually enjoyed reporters, punished the press with a lighter touch. He established the "Ananias Guild" — a symbolic identify of exile — for reporters who displeased him, and he filed a libel arrange against Joseph Pulitzer'southward New York World. President Woodrow Wilson reprised some of Lincoln'due south worst tendencies during Globe War I, imposing censorship of the press and pushing propaganda. And when information technology comes to President Richard Nixon, a man who once told his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, "The press is the enemy," the question isn't where to starting time merely where to end. Of the Nixon presidency Holzer writes, "Adversarial wariness gave way to open combat, inquiry to inquisition."
Holzer's fat book gives us a panoramic survey of the almost contentious president-on-press brawls from the by ii and a quarter centuries, providing both the scholar and the general reader with valuable perspective on the current bout betwixt Trump and reporters. The historic antagonism between presidents and the press is easily understood. Presidents regard data every bit power, and either hibernate information technology from their foes or reveal information technology on their schedule. They nigh universally believe that reporters deliberately misread them. Journalists, the greatest of all Nosy Parkers, consider themselves the guardians of truth and oversight, and distrust what the powerful say.
Holzer focuses on eighteen of the 45 presidents and avoids taking sides, although I must say I've rarely seen President Bill Clinton so sympathetically portrayed. At that place will never exist peace between the two institutions, Holzer implies, only varying levels of hostility. Students of the presidency and the press may be startled by the stink and temperature of the battle. (Disclosure: I'm cited twice past Holzer, both times neutrally.)
Historically, the press has given it to presidents as difficult as it has gotten it. For much of the Republic's offset century, when party command of newspapers was the rule, one gear up of papers would support the president while a separate set would oppose him — much like the way Fox News and MSNBC have tilted for Trump and Obama, only more and so. Early in George Washington'due south start term, The National Gazette defendant him of "wanting to be a king," and The Aurora made the baseless claim that he was stealing from the Treasury. Washington did non respond or retaliate, merely his private letters abound with rage against the taunting newspapers. Adams, who followed Washington, cataloged the slights committed confronting him past reporters and did retaliate with the Conflicting and Sedition Acts, which criminalized journalistic dissent in the name of national security. Denied a 2nd term, Adams rightly placed a portion of the arraign for his defeat on the press, which defied his attempts at control. In one case out of function, he complained that party-aligned newspapers kept their readers in partisan silos. Unexposed to competing ideas, readers came to think of every issue equally a litmus test of political party loyalty.
Holzer's best capacity are the ones on Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. An achieved Lincoln scholar, he indicts the 16th president for waging an "undeclared, unlegislated, unlitigated and largely unchallenged war" on newspapers during the Civil War. But this condemnation of Lincoln's suppressive tactics comes with a sympathetic interpretation of the president's view that the Matrimony could not be preserved without temporary limits on free voice communication and a gratis printing. "Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, while I must non bear on the hair of a wiley [sic] agitator who induces him to desert?" Lincoln wrote in a alphabetic character. "I retrieve that in such a case, to silence the agitator, and salve the boy, is not only constitutional, only, withal, a peachy mercy." It's a tribute to succeeding presidents and to the journalists who resisted the clampdown that the measures were non extended at the close of wartime.
Theodore Roosevelt probably did more to alter president-press relations than anyone who has held the office before or since. Administrations had always steered politically gainful news to reporters, but Roosevelt actively courted journalists. He was the commencement to give White House reporters working infinite within the building, enlisting them in a kind of partnership to create and disseminate news. He staged some of the first photo ops and invented the Sun news drib, feeding the press a hot story for the Monday editions. The upshot of Roosevelt's constant flackery, as one reporter of the era put it, was "more scoops of White Firm origin during the Roosevelt period than earlier or since." Presaging Donald Trump, Roosevelt liked to deflect press corps interest in covering bad news by drowning them with racier news of his making. He fully expected to come across himself on Page 1 every day.
Since the showtime Roosevelt, advances in applied science accept given presidents new means to circumvent the printing. Franklin Roosevelt leapfrogged reporters with his Fireside Chats on radio. (When Los Angeles's KFI dropped the chats in 1936, calling them "goose egg more than campaign speeches," Roosevelt'due south people threatened to lift its re-election advertisements from the station.) John Kennedy glassy his paradigm with television. Ronald Reagan advanced the news management techniques his predecessors had initiated, while Donald Trump has seized every technological advantage he can, from Twitter to cable news to Facebook, to sidestep the printing corps' scrutiny.
Trump has become the punching bag for the gimmicky printing, and while he deserves many of his beatings, Holzer offers bear witness that Barack Obama treated the printing as poorly, only differently. Obama subjected reporters to the almost invasive leaks investigations e'er and intentionally curtained the workings of his presidency from public scrutiny, as top reporters attest. In one report of the Obama administration, the former Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. wrote that its "state of war on leaks and other efforts to command data" were the virtually egregious Washington had seen since Nixon. The biggest difference between Obama'southward contest with the printing and Trump's — questions of the vulgarian in chief'due south style bated — was that Obama masked his enmity for the printing with a smile whereas Trump broadcasts his loathing for all the nation to see.
Both institutions accept grown more powerful over the past several decades, and more jealous of the other's ability, merely neither seems ready to break or retreat. Yep, things are bad in the presidential press scrum, merely they could exist worse. Imagine the bedlam should presidents and the press set up aside their animosity and join forces.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/25/books/review/the-presidents-vs-the-press-harold-holzer.html
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