CNN’s Clarissa Ward is an American journalist who regularly faces danger. Ward is at risk because she knocks on the Moscow apartment doors of officers of Russia’s FSB, the main internal security arm of President Vladimir Putin’s tyranny, to ask them about their attempted assassinations of political enemies. Ward is at risk because she meets and talks to terrorists for insightful interviews. She is at risk because she reports from war zones such as Darfur, in Sudan, where she was held prisoner this month.
In contrast, the Rev. Al Sharpton, the race-baiting TV presenter on MSNBC, is not at risk. Sitting in New York City studios in a sharp suit and criticizing former President Donald Trump is not dangerous.
This distinction matters for many reasons. One of those reasons is Trump’s idiotic claim that the press are the “enemy of the people” combined with later statements that he would use the military and National Guard against those who cause chaos on Election Day. Many in the press have equated these two comments to manufacture a threat of force against them. Ludicrously, Trump has also threatened to investigate NBC News for treason.
But the idea that a second Trump presidency will result in journalists being shipped to gulags for reporting on or criticizing him is utterly absurd. U.S. institutions are robust, and the coercive elements of government power serve the Constitution, not the president. We have seen politically biased prosecutions in recent years, which are deeply regrettable and concerning. But the U.S. military and federal law enforcement would not follow a presidential order to round up journalists, whoever demanded it.
Trump calling the press “the enemy of the people” is regrettable and concerning, but not because it portends arrests. Instead, it is because it may well encourage his more unhinged followers to threaten journalists.
Most journalists know this. Tediously, however, some are using Trump’s crass rhetoric to warn that next week’s election may decide whether they continue to live free or find themselves in an American gulag archipelago.
On her MSNBC show on Monday, host Jen Psaki responded, “You’re right,” when a panelist observed that Trump’s victory meant journalists might be sharing a cell in six months’ time. Last week, on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, co-host Donny Deutsch mused that Trump would bring about an “unfree media.” Deutsch then asked the panel, “Are there people around this table that are really worried, Rev. [Al Sharpton], going forward, are you worried that you’re on a list if Donald Trump is elected? Yes or no?”
Sharpton: “I’m convinced I’ll be on the list.”
Deutsch: “I am, too!”
Sharpton: “I don’t know how we’re not going to be on the list.”
Deutsch: “And think about that! This is America! This is the United States of America, and people in the media, like the Rev., have to be concerned that they may be on a list. I have people saying to me, ‘Donnie, are you worried?’ This is America! And yet, people will still give permission to vote for Donald Trump? What’s wrong with us!”
What’s wrong with us? Where to start?
I never met Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, but I do know that Al Sharpton is no Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Trump’s whims do not make law. The institutions of government held strong in Trump’s presidency and have held strong in President Joe Biden’s term, and they would hold again in a second Trump term. They will keep holding until the First Amendment is amended to read, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. Unless Donald J. Trump deems otherwise.”
In other words, it is not going to happen.
This is an important issue not simply for its silly misrepresentation of reality but for the disrespect it does to those journalists around the world who face real threats for doing their work. Their number includes American correspondents such as Ward, Fox News’s Trey Yingst, CNN’s Jim Sciutto, and NBC’s Richard Engel. This is only a very partial list. Courageous journalists like these are sometimes killed. That was the case with Daniel Pearl in Pakistan in 2002. That was the case in Syria with Marie Colvin and Gilles Jacquier in 2012 and so brutally with James Foley and Steven Sotloff in 2014. Other times, as with Austin Tice, who was kidnapped in 2012, journalists go missing and are presumed killed but with no closure or justice for their families. Bashar Assad must be held accountable for Tice’s fate.
It’s also true that journalists are sometimes murdered on U.S. soil by those who hold grudges over their reporting. This was so with the Capital Gazette reporters Gerald Fischman, John McNamara, Rob Hiaasen, and Wendi Winters in 2018 and Las Vegas investigative reporter Jeff German in 2022. Nevertheless, the threats facing American journalists pale in comparison with those faced by our counterparts from other nations.
Consider the situation in Latin America.
In his book Gangster Warlords, Ioan Grillo records how, in 2002, “the Brazilian investigative journalist Tim Lopes filmed gangs in a favela with a hidden camera. He had also filed another report that preceded a police crackdown. The gangsters discovered him, tied him to a tree, and conducted a ‘trial’ in which they found him guilty. They burned his eyes with cigarettes, used a samurai sword to cut off his arms and legs while he was still alive, put his body in a tire with gasoline and set him on fire. They call this murder technique the microonda, or ‘microwave oven.’”
Grotesque possibilities such as this one come with investigating narcotrafficking, organized crime, and political corruption in Latin America. In Mexico, dozens of journalists were murdered during former President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s time in office. Hundreds of others have been murdered since 2000. Even journalists who travel with full-time police protective details aren’t safe. A popular crime reporter, Alejandro Martinez Noguez, was gunned down while under protection last August. As with Regina Pérez’s 2012 murder, political corruption exacerbates the threat against Mexican journalists.
Via its list of journalists who have been killed for their work, the Committee to Protect Journalists makes clear where the risks are most pronounced. Being in Russian custody is very dangerous. As is reporting from war zones in Gaza and Ukraine. Journalists in Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan also face significant threats to their lives. Appearing on Morning Joe doesn’t, however, appear on any list of high-risk professions.
That brings us back to Trump. Trump may or may not encourage and allow more intrusive FBI investigations designed to identify journalist sources. This is a challenge but one that national security reporters already manage every day. Trump’s ego and fetish for loyalty suggest that he might like to jail journalists he dislikes, but that doesn’t mean he would be able to, even if the supposition as to his desires could be proved.
If he wins on Tuesday, Trump will have to swear an oath to the Constitution as all presidents do. If a president chooses to ignore the Constitution, he is held in check by a critical mass of other senior government officials who have sworn their own oaths to do so. It is tendentious to suppose that Trump will give unconstitutional orders, as Democrats insist he will — surely, Biden’s repeated slapdowns by the Supreme Court suggest this is a bipartisan tendency — but unconstitutional orders are refused or reversed.
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Setting aside the hyperbole for his political opponents, Trump will lack the means of law and action — it is more likely that he lacks the intention — to send journalists to prison simply because he dislikes what they are reporting on or saying.
Pretending otherwise, journalists do reality and their colleagues who truly serve in harm’s way a disservice.
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