How a leading journalism philanthropy is continuing to drop the ball
The most important statement Donald Trump ever made to a journalist was a truthful one. That was when he told CBS 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl, back in July 2016, when he was just a candidate and not yet president, why he spent so much time attacking the media. According to Stahl, “He said, ‘You know why I do it? I do it to discredit you all and demean you all so when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you.’”
Once you undermine public trust in the free press, all kinds of lies become easy to tell and sustain. That’s the central problem with authoritarians who seek power and wield it corruptly for their own benefit. They aren’t playing the game of democracy in good faith; they are using the very openness of the democratic system to break it at its core.
Last week’s live encounter between Fox News’ Tucker Carlson and Ben Smith, the cofounder of a new global news site called Semafor, demonstrated Trump’s modus operandi in action, showing what happens when a reporter trying to operate in good faith attempts to interview an authoritarian. (To catch up, here are my two previous posts about the event, the first asking why the Knight Foundation was backing it and the second written minutes after it ended, parsing the encounter.)
Literally, with the very first question raised by Smith, asking Carlson if he believed white people were superior to other races, bad faith was on display. Carlson said “of course not,” shamelessly gliding past the times he has praised “white men” for “creating civilization” and other such canards. Smith also tried to pin Carlson on his cozy relationships with white supremacists and with “great replacement theory” but again Carlson simply denied the facts and blustered over Smith until he gave up. Then, Carlson played his ace, calling Smith a propagandist and reminding his loyal fans that whatever bad things they might have heard Smith say about him, they were to be ignored because the mainstream media wasn’t to be trusted. Game, set, match.
Sadly, I’ve seen no public retrospection either by Smith or by the Knight Foundation, the sponsor of the Semafor event, about what they might have learned from it. Smith, as is his wont, has kept up a patter of posts on Twitter about various other stories in the news, from Elon Musk to the crypto crash to the assassination of a former Japanese prime minister and Joe Biden’s polling problems.
Even worse, to my mind, the Knight Foundation hasn’t made a peep, a shameful display of irresponsibility for an organization that claims to be a preeminent leader in supporting “informed and engaged communities” and a “more effective democracy.” I tried to get a comment about the event from its longtime president, Alberto Imbarguen, but he never responded. The most I could glean about the foundation’s thinking came from someone who used to work there and asked not to be identified, who said that it was easier to for Knight to simultaneously embrace its journalism-rooted First Amendment values — meaning, its desire to make room for all voices, including those it might find offensive — and its mission of strengthening democracy before a significant percentage of notable public figures “left the democracy camp.”
Well, that’s the problem, isn’t it? We’re in an asymmetrical game with people who have stopped playing by democracy’s rules, and too many of our leading institutions haven’t adjusted. There’s a big difference between bending over backwards to make room for unpopular views and insure that they can be freely expressed, and allowing an arsonist to burn down institutions enshrining free speech as a core value. Knight’s silence in the wake of this debacle shouldn’t be allowed to drop down Orwell’s memory hole. (Yes, that’s Knight’s logo up in the righthand corner of the video of the event.) It’s as if someone started choking during a dinner party and all the guests decided to act as if nothing bad was happening. Only the person choking is us, our democratic body politic, and the bystanders are the people with the most ability to intervene.