BETA
This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here

More From Forbes

Edit Story

It's Down To The Tech Industry To Protect Free Speech In The Trump Era

This article is more than 7 years old.

You’ve probably never heard of Joel Simon - and that’s okay. Until very recently, Simon and his organization flew under radar for most Americans. Once a year he hosted a glitzy fundraising dinner at the Waldorf Astoria. It was a dinner where the biggest names in media dined on chicken or fish, listened to stories of extraordinary bravery from around the world and wrote big checks.

But the election of Donald Trump and his increasingly adversarial engagement with journalists has forced Simon and his colleagues to shift their gaze from remote war zones and despots to his own backyard.

President Trump's Twitter rebuke of the press was ratcheted up to a new ominous level on Friday when he tweeted that the media “is the enemy of the American people.”

I’ve heard those words before. Just not here.

More than a decade ago, I sat at that Waldorf black tie dinner.

I’d just completed a film and a a journey to The Philippines, Pakistan, Baghdad, Rio de Janeiro, Iraq, and Israel’s West Bank. It was a documentary about six deaths - six Journalists Killed In The Line of Duty.  The film covered a 15-month period, during that time 46 journalists had died around the world. And Simon’s organization, The Committee To Protect Journalists, had been our partner in reporting for the film. It was a chilling and dangerous project, and everyone on the team was glad to be back on the safe soil of America - raising funds to protect truth-tellers around the world.

Anderson Cooper - host: Journalists: Killed in the Line of Duty (courtesy Monarch Films)

That was then.

Today, Simon’s concerns have shifted as our President uses the technology platform Twitter to broadcast sharply worded accusations of media bias and "fake news" and takes a posture that Simon knows all too well. It’s the language of despots and dictators. And those are hard words to write.

Simon, writing in a post for the Columbia Journalism Review drew deeply troubling conclusions.

"Ecuador’s Rafael Correa, Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, Bolivia’s Evo Morales, and Argentina’s Cristina Kirchner—along with the late Hugo Chávez of Venezuela—all rose to power in campaigns that targeted the media. In office, they continued their attacks” wrote Simon.

His evidence is detailed and hard to refute: “Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa has described critics in the press as “ignorant,” “trash-talking,” “liars,” “unethical,” “mediocre,” “ink-stained hit men.” Daniel Ortega calls journalists “children of Goebbels” and enemies of the Nicaraguan people. Hugo Chávez frequently called the media opposition coup plotters and fascists. More mildly, Argentine President Néstor Kirchner and Uruguayan President Tabaré Ramón Vázquez Rosas refer to the press as the “unelected political opposition.” Sound familiar?

Certainly, Trump isn’t the first president to frame journalists as their enemy. Richard Nixon was famous for his hatred of the press, and raged against “distorted” and “hysterical” reporting - calling the press “the enemy.” But Carl Bernstein, whose reporting with Bob Woodward at The Washington Post revealed Watergate and led to Nixon’s resignation, said: "Attacks on press by @realDonaldTrump more treacherous than Nixon’s.” Treacherous in part because of the raw and unfiltered nature of his accusations, and the rapid linking and social media distribution of even the most provably absurd claims.

And Joel Simon, with a global perspective and 11 years as the Executive Director of CPJ, is now sounding an urgent alarm. "The necessary first step of a strategy of fomenting greater political polarization is to marginalize the media.” Simon’s organization sees troubling similarities to leaders in some of the darkest corners of the world. "Lashing out at the media at public events; denouncing and vilifying individual journalists, expelling reporters, blocking access, and threatening lawsuits: Trump and Chávez have these things in common. Like Trump, Chávez insisted on his own version of reality - now known as “alternative facts.”

Now, to be fair, the comparisons also have some significant disparities. The U.S. media is independent, financially stable - though challenged - and we have the powerful protections of the First Amendment in place. But those protections are under attack. "Trump’s intent is clear. Through his relentless attacks, he seeks to create an environment in which critical media is marginalized and the truth is unknowable” says Simon.

So we’re at a critical crossroads. Of course, there’s no such thing as “the media” - there are newspapers, television networks, cable networks, blogs, wire services, and international publications as well. The recent advent of social media adds the ability to magnify misinformation without critical review Trump’s broad-brush attack on the media attempts to create a monolithic enemy that simply doesn’t exist. He may not like a particular story, or a journalist, or even a news organization, but twitter’s 140 characters alone can’t alone represent his communication with a deeply concerned public who are now paying attention to his every move.

Simon cautions us that it's tempting for the media to be drawn into an activist stance. He says there’s danger ahead, “But only if the U.S. media takes the bait, and starts acting more like the opposition,” says Simon. "The high-impact reporting in recent days on the links between Trump aides and Russia shows that the media retains sufficient credibility in the US to change the political dynamic. It is also a vivid reminder of what’s at stake."

A free press is a fragile thing, and in many parts of the world, it is in grave danger. Free speech is core to our Democracy - it isn't something you can suspend and reinstate as suits the current political climate. We’re living in a new world of instant information decimation. That’s going to challenge tech leaders and platform providers to rethink their position of being neutral providers without a responsibility to filter or edit. As much as we may wish for a more "media-literate" consumer, it will fall to CEO’s of Google, Facebook, and Reddit to lead the way.

Journalists: Killed In The Line Of Duty was produced in 2003, in conjunction with The Committee to Protect Journalists and aired on the Bravo Network. You can screen it with Amazon Prime for free - here. It is hosted by Anderson Cooper and narrated by Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings, Christianna Amanpour, Anne Garrels and Walter Cronkite. 

Check out my website