The leadership of the FCC is openly boasting that a merger involving Skydance and Paramount, owner of CBS, will hopefully bring that network under “control” so that it will begin telling the American people the “truth.” The government is also making no secret of its intent to control the news on Comcast-owned NBC.
As the Trump administration boldly moves to take over the news industry, controlling the flow of information to the people, journalists have a special responsibility to resist. The performance of journalists at a Sunday press conference given by Trump at his Scotland golf course prior to his trade deal meeting with the EU’s Ursula von der Leyen was a sorry show of negligence and incompetence on the part of the people we trust to report the news.
President Trump’s performance at that presser, as MSNBC’s Velshi said on national television afterward, was “bat poop crazy.”
Even worse than how crazy it was, however, was the fact that no one in the media challenged even one of the absurd lies spewed by Trump. Had any of those lies and bonkers statements been put out at a press conference by any other president, people in the Cabinet would surely have invoked the 25th Amendment to remove him from office.
Trump extensively praised the ballroom at his Scotland golf course, the site of his trade talks with the EU. It was a blatant commercial for a property he owns and essentially an invitation to the world’s rich and famous to visit.
He criticized the designers of the White House, who he said planned it without a ballroom, but he pledged to solve that “problem” by having a ballroom “dropped” into it.
No one in the press questioned him about the appropriateness of advertising his own personal business and pushing for others to come and pour money into it.
He then went on a rant about windmills, which, he said, are “the most expensive form of energy and killing us.” He pledged to “never allow a single windmill ever to be built again in the United States.” There are some countries in the EU, whose leader he was about to meet with, that get 40% of their energy from windmills.
He said the blades of windmills rust and are buried underground after eight years, with their fibers causing massive and permanent damage to the soil in every direction for many miles. “The soil becomes useless,” he said, “and life is being killed.”
He said the windmills are killing birds and are so noisy that they are driving whales crazy, prompting them to beach themselves and then die. He said this was a big problem on the beaches of Massachusetts. He called people who support windmills “crazy and dangerous radicals.”
He said that fossil fuel energy is cheaper than so-called clean energy because it requires no government subsidies, which wind and solar energy, he said, do. The reality, of course, is that the U.S. heavily subsidizes the fossil fuel industry, as do EU countries that rely on it. Not one reporter brought this up.
Nor did even a single reporter question any of his other absurd remarks about wind mills or fossil fuel energy or their effects on the environment. None mentioned the massive job creation that has been sparked by clean energy industries.
Asked by one journalist whether Israel should be allowing more aid to reach starving Gazans, Trump ignored the question and instead delivered a monologue about how he gets no recognition. The president bizarrely claimed that the U.S. alone, with no one else, has prevented starvation from happening in Gaza. He said the U.S. provided $65 million a few weeks ago and complained that “no one has thanked us.”
The truth is that no one has prevented starvation in Gaza. Not one reporter challenged Trump’s facts by pointing out that even doctors, journalists, and hospital staff in Gaza are now out of food and that mass starvation there has not been prevented by the U.S. or that it is particularly affecting children.
Not one reporter challenged him with the truth that the UN is trying to provide food, or that aid has been coming also from EU countries, or that it is U.S.-backed contractors and the Israeli government that are blocking the aid and even killing people desperately begging for food. No one even asked who it was that was supposed to thank Trump for sending food aid to Gaza.
He claimed that he was responsible for ending the genocide of seven million people in Rwanda. That genocide, which horrifically involved 800,000 to 2 million people, ended in 1994, long before Trump had anything to do with the situation in Rwanda or anywhere else in Africa, for that matter. His first presidential term happened many years later.
His intervention now in the long-simmering conflict between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo has nothing to do with ending genocide, and it’s not motivated by a commitment to peace. Instead, as in Ukraine, he’s got his eye on mineral deals that would be lucrative for U.S. capitalism.
There is no question that in other times, a president making the kind of remarks made by Trump would set in motion 25th Amendment procedures to remove him from office on the basis of inability to do his job. The sycophants who make up his entire Cabinet, however, cannot be expected to do that.
Even worse, however, is that a collection of U.S. and European journalists who know better allowed the president to make his remarks and dispense a great deal of lying right-wing propaganda with not a hint of a challenge to any of his lies.
If journalists don’t step up and do their jobs, truth and democracy may not survive.
As with all op-eds published by People’s World, the views represented here are those of the author.
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