Op-eds

Who’s an ‘Enemy of the People?

 

Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal took this photo during the battle of Iwo Jima in 1945.

By Bill Kovarik

Donald Trump claims that the press is the ‘enemy of the people.’  Let’s think about that.

Was Joe Rosenthal an ‘enemy of the people’ when he climbed Mount Suribachi  on Iwo Jima and came back with a photo of the US Marines putting up the Stars and Stripes?   The Associated Press photo ran in newspapers and magazines around the world on February 25, 1945.  It became so iconic, so loaded with meaning about sacrifice and service, that it would be adopted as the Marine Corps  monument in Washington DC.  Think about that.

Was John Hersey an enemy of the people when he wrote about the heroic struggle of a PT Boat commander to save his crew after his boat was destroyed in combat?  The June 17, 1944  New Yorker story about Lt. John F. Kennedy’s ordeal in the Solomon Islands added to the luster of the man who became president in 1960.   After Kennedy left the Navy, he served for a brief time as a journalist himself.  Think about it.

Was Benjamin Franklin an enemy of the people when he used his position as a printer, editor, scientist and ambassador to make the case for an independent United States in the 1770s?

Was NY World publisher  Joseph Pulitzer an enemy of the people when he established the Pulitzer Prizes, the American hallmark of excellence in writing and publishing?  Did his principles somehow miss that mark when, on April 10, 1907,  he said:

[The press]  “will always fight for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice or corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties, never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty.”

Ida B. Wells, American journalist who exposed lynching in the South in the 1890s.

Was Ida B. Wells an enemy of the people when she documented the horror and injustice of lynching, or when her newspaper presses were destroyed in 1892  by a mob of crazed white men who were afraid of the truth?  It wasn’t the first time that racist mobs destroyed newspapers.

Was Elijah Lovejoy an enemy of the people? In Alton, Ill, on Nov. 7, 1837, Lovejoy was killed   as he tried to defend his press and anti-slavery publication from a mob enraged at his strident abolitionism. His name is one of the first names on the memorial to journalists who have been killed in the line of duty.

The list of American journalists who have always remained devoted to the public welfare is actually very long.  It includes Isaiah Thomas, who reported the Battle of Lexington in 1775; CBS anchor Walter Cronkite;  ABC anchor Barbara Walters;  NY World editor Walter Lippmann; soldier’s writer Ernie Pyle; War correspondent Richard Harding Davis;  CBS reporter George Polk, killed while covering the Greek Civil War; Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, Ben Bradlee and Katharine Graham of the Washington Post;  Bill Moyers of PBS; and many more.  (See NYU’s list as a starting point).

A list of American journalists also includes:

  • Hezekiah Niles, the early 19th century Baltimore editor who tried to avert a feared civil war, which did indeed take place; Thomas Morris Chester, a black correspondent who covered the US Civil War;  Henry Grady, the Atlanta editor who adopted some of Niles ideas and envisioned a  ‘new South’ in the 1880s; and Ralph McGill, another Atlanta editor who saw civil rights as a southern responsibility in the 1950s and 60s.

In witnessing the suffering of American civil rights demonstrators …  the press came to be regarded as a vital element in the long and difficult process of national reconciliation.  It was (and is) a process that, despite its many imperfections, stands as an example of the value of a free press and its contribution to long-term social stability. (From Revolutions in Communication)

  •  Marguerite Higgins,   Edward R. Murrow and many others who reported on the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, and who were told on April 25, 1945 by Gen. (and later, president) Dwight D. Eisenhower:

You [journalists] saw only one camp yesterday. There are many others. Your responsibilities, I believe, extend into a great field, and informing the people at home of things like these atrocities is one of them….Nothing is covered up. We have nothing to conceal. The barbarous treatment these people received in the German concentration camps is almost unbelievable. I want you to see for yourself and be spokesmen for the United States.

There are thousands more. And on June 28, 2018, five more journalists were assassinated by a disgruntled lunatic whose fantasies were enflamed by Donald Trump and his ‘enemies of the people’ rhetoric.

An international list of journalists devoted to the public welfare is far too long to contemplate, but it would surely include Ken Saro-Wiwa of Nigeria, executed in 1995  for exposing the horrors that Shell Oil Co. and the petroleum industry inflicted on Africa; Daniel Pearl, a Wall Street Journal reporter who hoped to understand the Taliban, killed in Pakistan in 2002;  and  Anna Politkovskaya of Russia, a vocal critic of Vladimir Putin, murdered by contract killers in 2006.  A good starting point for more information is the International Press Institute’s World Press Freedom Heroes.

So who, really, is the enemy of the people?  The journalists who remain devoted to the public welfare? Or a president who cannot resist cheap shots at the many people and things he cannot comprehend??

Think about it.

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Here’s a sample of the media reaction to Trump’s ‘Enemy of the People’ campaign: