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.
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.’”
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.
In
fact, Sanders had written two previous books of investigative journalism, both
successful, but on this case his journalism threatened a sitting Democratic
president. That threat turned Sanders from a journalist into a “conspiracy
theorist.” He spent five years on federal probation, his wife Elizabeth three.
As
with Sanders, the major media have refused to concede that James
O’Keefeof Project Veritas is a journalist, this despite the fact that
at the time of O’Keefe’s arrest his undercover reporting had just brought down
ACORN, a corrupt $2 billion leftist organization.
In
2010, shortly after the ACORN bust, O’Keefe and three colleagues attempted to
investigate whether Senator Mary Landrieu’s office in New Orleans was blocking
calls from Tea Party activists.
Although
the four showed their actual driver’s licenses to get into a federal building,
the Feds arrested them and charged them with a misdeanor “entry by false
pretenses.” O’Keefe spent a night in jail and three years on restrictive
federal probation, specifically for telling the Landrieu staffers he was
waiting for someone when he wasn’t.
The
national media were gleeful. They called the O’Keefe affair the “Louisiana
Watergate” and “Watergate Jr.” The New York Times and
Washington Post both put the arrest on the front page.
The Post headline read, “ACORN Foe Charged in Alleged Plot
to Wiretap Landrieu.” Retractions followed -- the four knew nothing about
wiretapping -- but who reads retractions.
Even
more shameful was the media’s treatment of Nakoula Basseley
Nakoula in 2012. Needing to blame something other than her own
incompetence for the assault on the Benghazi consulate, Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton released a memo the night of the attack indicting some
“inflammatory material posted on the Internet." Nakoula, an American
citizen, produced the video that allegedly did the inflaming.
Nakoula
was vulnerable. He had been arrested years earlier for a check-kiting scheme
and cooperated quietly with the feds. To protect him, the feds sealed the
document. After Benghazi, the Obama DoJ promptly unsealed it and leaked it to
the New York Times.
The Times reported
on Nakoula’s earlier conviction just three days after the smoke had cleared in
Benghazi. The release of this information exposed Nakoula to harassment by the
media and reprisal from the ringleader of the check-kiting operation.
Once
he was identified, the Times and the other media camped out
in front of Nakoula’s California house, not to protect him from the death
threats he was facing, but to join in the manhunt. To assure their readers they
had tracked the right man, the Times’ reporters pointed out
the similarities between Nakoula’s front door and the front door of a house
used in the video.
Still
on probation and feeling like he had little choice, Nakoula pled guilty to
unauthorized use of the Internet in his uploading of the video. He was
sentenced to one year in prison and four years of supervised release.
Some
months after his arrest I tracked Nakoula down to La Tuna, a federal prison in
the westernmost tip of Texas. I was the first person in the media to contact
him. As with Sanders and O’Keefe, the media ignored his imprisonment or cheered
it.
For
more than a year, 20-something David Daleiden and
his group, Center for Medical Progress, recorded undercover videos of
several Planned Parenthood clinics that trafficked in baby parts. The videos
had to potential to shake up the 2016 election. Even Hillary Clinton called
them “disturbing.”
The
major media, of course, refused to show the videos. When Planned Parenthood’s
Democratic allies in Texas and California had Daleiden arrested on charges even
more trumped up than O’Keefe’s in New Orleans, the media turned their
collective back. Into the void stepped Planned Parenthood spokespeople, now
confidently dismissing this damning evidence as “faked criminal videos,” a
charge the media reinforced.
To
be called ‘an enemy of the people,’ even by the president, carries no known
risk. To become an enemy of the media, however, comes with considerable risk --
even for liberals who may have thought themselves immune.
Molly Norris, once a
cartoonist for the liberal Seattle Weekly, learned this new
reality the hard way. In 2010, upset by Muslim threats against the creators of
the TV show “South Park,” Norris conceived the nicely mischievous new holiday,
"Everybody Draw Muhammed Day."
“Do your part to both water down the
pool of targets,” wrote Norris bravely, “and, oh yeah, defend a little
something our country is famous for... the first amendment.”
Norris apparently had not gotten the
DNC memo. The national left had absorbed Muslims into the multicultural rainbow
and elevated their sensitivities over any quaint notion of free speech. Her
cartoon in the Seattle Weekly announcing the event quickly
went viral, and just as quickly, Islamic firebrands went postal.
Norris came under increasing pressure
and quickly backed off. Not satisfied with Norris’s surrender,
Yemeni-American cleric Anwar al-Awlaki insisted she be made “a prime target of
assassination.” The FBI took the threat seriously enough to recommend that
Norris “go ghost.” In other words, Norris had to scrub her identity and
disappear on her own dime.
No one of note in the liberal media,
not even her friends at the Seattle Weekly, came to her defense.
One colleague informed the readers that “depictions of the prophet are
considered sacrilege by many Muslims” as if to suggest that Norris deserved her
fate.
Norris went ghost in July 2010 and has
not surfaced since. Unlike her former colleagues, it is not President Trump who
worries her. To become an enemy of the media is to risk one’s career, one’s
freedom, even one’s life.
