Fourth of four parts.
Re: “Trump Killed Objective Journalism, Gabler Says”
President-elect Trump already has promised to take his war on the press into courtrooms and the halls of Congress.
He wants to loosen libel protections. He has threatened Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos of Amazon with an antitrust suit.
Individual journalists have reason to fear him as well. He already has singled out NBC’s Katy Tur, perhaps the best of the television reporters, so that she needed the Secret Service to escort her from one of his rallies.
Jewish journalists who have criticized Mr. Trump have been subjected to vicious anti-Semitism and intimidation from the alt-right.
For the press, this is likely to be the new normal in an America in which white supremacists, neo-Nazi militias, racists, sexists, homophobes and anti-Semites have been legitimized by a new president who “says what I’m thinking.” It will be open season.
This converts the media from reporters to targets. And they have little recourse.
Still, if anyone points the way forward, it may be New York Times columnist David Brooks. No paragon, Mr. Brooks always had seemed to willfully neglect modern Republicanism’s incipient fascism (now no longer incipient).
He was an apologist for conservative self-enrichment and bigotry.
But this campaign season, Mr. Brooks pretty much dispensed with politics. He seemed to have arrived at the conclusion that no good could possibly come of any of this and retreated into spirituality.
What Mr. Brooks promoted were values of mutual respect, a bolder sense of civic engagement, an emphasis on community and neighborhood, and overall a belief in trickle-up decency rather than trickle-down economics.
He is not hopeful, but he hasn’t lost all hope.
For those of us now languishing in despair, this may be a prescription for rejuvenation.
We have lost the country, but by refocusing, we may have gained our own little patch of the world and, more granularly, our own family.
Changing Face of Reporting
For journalists, Mr. Brooks may show how political reporting, which, as I said, is likely to be irrelevant in the Trump age, might yield to a broader moral context in which one considers the effect that policy, strategy and governance have not only on our physical and economic well-being but also on our spiritual well-being.
In a society that is likely to be fractious and odious, we need a national conversation on values. The media could help start it.
But the disempowered media may have one more role to fill: They must bear witness. Many years from now, future generations will need to know what happened to us and how it happened. They will need to know how disgruntled white Americans, full of self-righteous indignation, found a way to take back a country they felt they were entitled to and which they believed had been lost.
They will need to know about the ugliness and evil that destroyed us as a nation after great men like Lincoln and Roosevelt guided us through previous crises and kept our values intact.
They will need to know, and they will need a vigorous, engaged, moral media to tell them. They will also need us.
We are not living for ourselves anymore in this country. Now we are living for history.
Mr. Gabler’s essay originally appeared at www.billmoyers.com. He is an author of five books and the recipient of two L.A. Times Book Prizes, Time magazine’s non-fiction book of the year, USA Today’s biography of the year. He is a senior fellow at the Norman Lear Center at USC. and is currently writing a biography of Sen. Edward Kennedy.
