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Book Review: Enemy of the People

This review originally appeared in the Washington Independent Review of Books on 21 September 2018.

Book Title: Enemy of the People: Trump's War on the Press, the New McCarthyism, and the Threat to American Democracy

Recently, I had occasion to use a quote from Washington Post executive Editor Marty Baron: “We’re not at war, we’re at work.” He uttered those words last October while he and Dean Baquet, executive editor of the New York Times, were at the National Press Club filming an edition of “The Kalb Report” with the host, veteran journalist and author Marvin Kalb.

The topic under discussion was freedom of the press, and Baron was responding to the idea that his newspaper is “at war” with the current administration. While Baron, famously unflappable, appeared almost sanguine about the state of U.S. journalism in the face of endless presidential vitriol, his interviewer, Kalb, was not. In fact, he was clearly alarmed.

That sense of alarm comes through palpably and unapologetically in Kalb’sEnemy of the People: Trumps’s War on the Press, the New McCarthyism, and the Threat to American Democracy. The author makes this clear right up front, answering in the affirmative to his own question, “could I, after all these years, drop my usual dedication to objective journalism and, for probably the first time in my professional life, tell the public what I truly felt about Trump and his approach to the press?”

In fact, he does not confine his opinion to that singular element, as evidenced by such passages as this one: “The partisan split, which had divided American politics for decades, only widened further as Trump and his troops stormed into Washington, taking the nation and the world hostage to his chaotic, authoritarian style of leadership.” When it comes to throwing off journalistic objectivity for the first time in a 60-year career, Kalb has decided to go all in.

Arguably, if any living journalist deserves to do so, it’s Kalb, who interrupted work on his three-part memoir to produce this slender volume. Old enough to have met Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow during the brief post-Stalin “thaw” of 1956, when Kalb was a young translator at the U.S. Embassy, he has witnessed and reported on enough modern history to have earned the opportunity to offer his unvarnished perspective.

In a stunning bit of timing, Kalb had already decided to offer his opinions on the president and the press in a speech he was to give at the Cosmos Club on February 16, 2017. That was the same day Trump tweeted that the press “is the enemy of the American People.” For Kalb, those words, “enemy of the people,” favored by dictators throughout world history, served as his red line. He rewrote the opening of his speech, and the battle was joined.

It’s worth noting that Kalb was a target of the last U.S. president who had an especially ugly relationship with the press: Richard Nixon. Nixon had Kalb’s phone wiretapped and his office ransacked, and yet Kalb feels strongly that there is something more dangerous about this administration even than that one.

Another crucial entry in Kalb’s bona fides is his distinction as being the last of the journalists recruited by Edward R. Murrow — “Murrow’s Boys” — to join CBS News. The bulk of this book focuses on the parallels between junior Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy and Donald J. Trump, and examines the determined reporting led by Murrow and his team to shine a scalding light on McCarthy’s anti-Communist rampage, which eventually led to the senator’s downfall.

Beyond sharing the no-holds-barred lawyer Roy Cohn, McCarthy and Trump share any number of other unsavory traits and abetting environmental factors, including a legislative branch that has misplaced its spine. Both men use the press to their advantage, lie egregiously, and play to the darkest impulses of their listeners. Both are wildly popular with their followers, seemingly untouchably so.

It’s as though Cohn is describing his later client when he spoke of McCarthy as being “impatient, overly aggressive, overly dramatic. He acted on impulse…He would neglect to do important homework…He was selling the story of America’s peril.”

The parallels are useful, but they only go so far. Murrow had a long-standing relationship of trust with the American people, having brought the Blitz alive for them — almost single-handedly creating on-location radio and later television reporting as he did so — and then giving them on-the-ground reporting during World War II. And he kept his powder dry until he felt his team was fully prepared to make the case against McCarthy and his tactics.

And though McCarthy hitched his fortunes to the hottest topic of the time to ride to prominence, he was in the end a one-trick pony. This allowed Murrow and others the relative luxury of having a single area on which to focus audience attention. In contrast, the current president has journalists playing daily — even hourly — Whack-a-Mole, where the shifting, unending outrages lead to a sort of numb exhaustion.

It’s been a long time since America has had an Ed Murrow or a Walter Cronkite to speak to the entire nation from a place of trust. If McCarthy’s moment had come in an age of social media and 24-hour cable news playing to splintered, partisan audiences — well, that would be what we have now, the raging demagogue, but this time with no trusted Murrow-like newsman to bring him to heel.

The other unfortunate parallel between McCarthy and Trump is that both are exceedingly good at selling newspapers and driving up TV news ratings. Kalb quotes political reporter Willard Edwards of the Chicago Tribune saying, “McCarthy was a dream story. I wasn’t off page one for four years.”

In Kalb’s discussion with Baron and Baquet, both guests acknowledged their respective papers’ return to solid financial ground after a number of rocky years; neither one addressed the role that Trump’s virtual ownership of the news cycle may have played in the health of the papers’ balance sheets. Could Trump be right that the media needs him as much as he needs them?

Kalb has written this book as something of a journalists’ call to arms, reminding them that determined reporters can and do make a difference in rooting out and spotlighting corruption, and in holding our leaders accountable to the people they represent. On August 15, 300 newspapers nationwide published editorials to push back against this idea that the news media is the enemy of the people, rather than being one of the pillars of democracy.

Which brings me back to why I was using Marty Baron’s quote. It was for a poster I carried at a march, in memory of my oldest friend and long-time newsman, John McNamara, one of the five people killed at the Capital Gazette for the sole reason that he worked for the newspaper. So it’s not a big stretch for me to agree with Kalb’s final sentences: “And, so, with all due respect to the office you hold, Mr. President, the ‘enemy of the people’ is not the press. It is you.”

Requiem

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This column originally appeared in Jenny’s “Write Now” book blog in the Washington Independent Review of Books on July 5, 2018.

I have no memory of a time when I didn’t know John McNamara. I was eighteen months old to his two and half years when my family moved into our little Cape Cod whose backyard touched catty-corner with his. He and his siblings went to Catholic school while my brother and I went to the public school across the street, but we spent virtually every day of our summers together as we grew up.

In about 1971, which would make me nine and John ten, a handful of us — including my brother Chris, John’s brother Tom, and our friend Thomas — decided to put out a newspaper. Hanging out on our screened porch, we wrote copy by hand and typed it up on an old manual typewriter; copies were made using carbon paper. We put out a few issues by the end of the summer. So John started in journalism even earlier than you may have heard.

Of John, I can truly say that we have been lifelong friends.

(The photo above shows him at an early 90s Halloween party dressed as Fred Flintstone, something for his young colleagues he would term an OCR: “obscure cultural reference.”)

He and his wife, Andrea, celebrated their 33rd wedding anniversary in May, and I don’t know another two people who are a better match for each other. As Andrea recently said, their biggest argument was about which of them was the luckier to have the other. He was set to celebrate his 57th birthday at the end of this month.

Though John was unabashedly a sports guy, I can’t think of a single subject we ever talked about on which he didn’t have an informed perspective. He was a citizen of the world: knowledgeable, engaged, intellectually curious.

The last time I talked to him — Saturday, a week ago practically to the minute as I write this, at my nephew’s engagement party — we were discussing the upcoming Tuesday primaries and the endorsements his paper’s editorial staff had made. I live in Anne Arundel County, and the Annapolis paper that John wrote for, the Capital Gazette, addressed local races and candidates that matter to me.

In attempting to hold up my end of the democratic bargain of being part of an informed citizenry, I fully appreciate how lucky I am to still have a functioning local newspaper that actually covers those races.

The last time I talked to John was also five days before he and four of his colleagues were shot to death while simply trying to do their job to get that daily local paper out.

In the scant 48 hours since we learned the worst, when I manage to drag myself away from obsessively searching for and reading or watching everything I can find that mentions John, I wonder at how he and his colleagues arrived — through these most horrific circumstances — at the confluence of so many of the hot-button issues of our current moment in the American story.

I will set aside for this moment the hottest of the hot-button issues — gun violence, the one category in which the United States can claim unrivaled, zero-competition primacy — though I have always wondered at the insistence we have on calling each new mass shooting a “tragedy,” when the correct word is “massacre.”

I will even leave aside the president’s savagery of the mainstream news media, and the increasing threats of physical violence that many journalists report receiving, though I will point you to Katy Tur’s descriptions in her book Unbelieveable: My Front-Row Seat to the Craziest Campaign in American History of the then-candidate whipping his crowds into “cheering about the idea of killing journalists,” a la Vladimir Putin.

Instead, in tribute to John, my focus is on the crucial, unique role that local newspapers play in maintaining our democratic process.

In his latest book, Overload: Finding the Truth in Today’s Deluge of News, Bob Schieffer notes in alarm the dwindling number of small city papers, the ones we have traditionally counted on to keep an eye on our state and local elected officials. Perhaps even more concerning are the papers being bought up by wealthy patrons with the intent of driving a specific agenda on and off the editorial page.

It seems less and less that all politics is local, when the politics coming out of the White House and Congress consumes so much of our limited attention span, and as it becomes increasingly difficult for well-intentioned citizens to find non-partisan, fact-based information about the entire slate of candidates we vote for.

And yet, it’s our local officials who typically have the greatest immediate impact on our daily lives, from choices on local policing tactics to the manner in which to enforce federal statutes. We need local papers for their ability to focus our attention on our immediate communities, on which the rest of our world is built.

I joked with John that I subscribed to the Capital primarily to do my part to keep him employed. Sometimes it didn’t feel like a joke. In the 20 years I’ve lived in Anne Arundel County, I’ve watched in alarm as the paper continues to shrink in every figurative and literal way; it’s even printed on smaller sheets of newsprint now.

Through John, I heard the blow-by-blow of the paper’s acquisition by the larger but also struggling Baltimore Sun, and winced at the realization that the acquiring newsroom now got first dibs on the plum assignments, including the sports desk. Still, on his new beat, John continued to tell human stories, as he always had, elegantly and eloquently.

One was of a Crownsville man who, after the Marjory Stoneman Douglas massacre, crushed his assault rifles with heavy construction equipment and posted the ceremony on YouTube. Another recent story remembered the crowds that gathered in Bowie and elsewhere in Maryland 50 years ago to witness Robert Kennedy’s funeral train as it traveled from New York to Washington, DC.

But John also did his share of reporting on the local political races, his final printed story being on the projected outcome of the Prince George’s County Executive race.

For those of you who have been following the story out of Annapolis of five people who died because they worked for a newspaper, and want to know what you can do to help, here is my best advice on how to honor these people:

Subscribe to the local paper closest to you. Call them on it — in something better than four-letter words — if you find opinion leeching into their news stories, but support them in getting it right.
Do your very best to be an informed, involved, engaged citizen. It is not an easy task, but make a concerted attempt to understand who is running for which offices — county council, sheriff, board of education, judiciary — and what positions they hold on the issues they will be involved in and that you care most about.
Vote. In a democracy, choosing not to vote is never the right choice.

I will always remember John in his element, telling a story with that twinkle in his eyes, gesticulating with an open hand or a pointing finger to further the tale, getting his whole body into the telling of it. As many of his friends have noted, we could count on his dry, observant wit to cut to the heart of any issue with surgical precision. He always made me laugh.

I leave you with this thought, which comes directly from John. In one of his last Facebook posts, on June 10th, he offered this:

To anyone reading this: I cannot urge you strongly enough to see the two documentaries now out featuring Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Mr. Rogers. Seeing these two films will do you some serious good. Both are marvelous and moving. And, in these troubled times, when the forces of darkness seem to have gained the upper hand, it’s nice to be reminded that there is still justice and kindness in the world. You can thank me later…

John, I thank you now, later, and always. Godspeed.

(Read more of John’s most recent stories here. And find out more about the fund has been set up to help the victims’ families here.)

Book Review: Overload: Finding the Truth in Today’s Deluge of News

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This review originally appeared in the Washington Independent Review of Books on 18 October 2017.

In a campaign and early presidency that has been filled with alarming pronouncements, Donald Trump’s branding the independent press “the enemy of the American people” raised its share of eyebrows. However, it’s the question of how that independent press is going to survive into the future that has veteran journalist Bob Schieffer concerned.

Much of what he and co-author H. Andrew Schwartz address in Overload are issues that have been brewing since the birth of cable news and have kicked into hyper-drive now that everyone holds instant news in the palm of their hand. But it was the 2016 presidential campaign that truly underlined for Schieffer the magnitude of what is at risk.

It turns out that Overload is a manual of sorts for both journalists and civilians who care about maintaining a thriving fourth estate and who are making a good-faith attempt at participating in the well-informed citizenry that the Founding Fathers knew was crucial to a functioning democracy. It’s their aim to help that audience, as the subtitle says, “[Find] the truth in today’s deluge of news.”

If we think this last campaign was tough for us to get through, consider what it was like for a guy who’s been in print and broadcast journalism for 60 years. According to Schieffer, he used the phrase “I’ve never seen anything like it” so often in his television appearances that his colleagues started a drinking game over it.

He ticks off the grim statistics of the many newspapers that have folded, the number of states lacking a single newspaper that covers its congressional delegation in DC, and the fact that, in the best year for newspaper circulation in ages, several venerable dailies still ceased publication.

The worry is that, outside of DC, New York, and L.A., regional news outlets are simply disappearing. Where will citizens find (possibly) non-partisan information on local and state candidates, and who will keep an eye on those candidates once they become elected officials?

Still, though the details here are often disheartening, it’s not all bad news, and there is something comforting about reading words of encouragement from someone who is one of the acknowledged greats in the business and has — certainly after the last two years — truly seen it all.

The authors discuss the newspapers that are doing things well, primarily by realizing that putting ink onto newsprint should not be their only — or even their primary — focus; the broadcast and cable networks and staff that seem to have a guiding set of principles; and even radio’s continued contribution in the form of the venerable NPR.

They share contributions from some of the other media greats. Very helpfully, the authors provide a roundup of the best or best-known examples of media outlets, including the “natively digital” news websites like Politico, Slate, and (yes) Breitbart, as well as podcasts and newsletters.

There is much here to consider, but the question remains unanswered as to how media outlets make enough money to survive in an online world whose participants generally expect content to be free. Even with plummeting print ads, newspapers still typically make more money in print than in online advertising.

Also, how does a legitimate outlet that needs paying subscribers to stay afloat compete with fake-news purveyors who spread their content for free in order to further a partisan agenda? In fact, as the authors point out, fake news is wildly remunerative, with one former writer reporting that he made $10,000 to $30,000 a month churning out fake articles.

The other issue in the constant, instantaneous, and thoroughly interconnected news-iverse is that incorrect information, once distributed — whether innocently or with malice aforethought — can never be called back. That’s why it’s disturbing to know that BuzzFeed’s editorial policy is, “When in doubt, publish,” and the Daily Beast advises its reporters that 70 percent certainty in a story’s accuracy is good enough, on the premise that wrong information can be corrected as quickly as it was disseminated.

Tell that to the folks at Comet Ping-Pong in DC.

Even for the media outlets that work hard to get the facts right, it’s worth noting that not all facts are of equivalent value to an informed populace, nor of equivalent cost to report. It’s extremely easy to report factually what a candidate says, but exponentially more demanding of time, resources, and tenacity to be able to report the degree to which there is any truth behind the words themselves.

Overload ought to become required reading in journalism curricula. Indeed, in his afterword, Schieffer offers a final teachable moment by illustrating what journalistic tenacity actually looks like to those who would learn the lesson.

David Fahrenthold of the Washington Post recently won the Pulitzer Prize for the reporting he did on Donald Trump’s charitable giving. This was a journalist’s hearing the words the candidate said and then deciding to see whether those words held true, and his paper being willing to let him.

After the campaign, Fahrenthold wrote an article describing exactly how he got the story, which involved months of dogged pursuit that included calling 300 different charities. With the Post’s permission, Schieffer reprints the article in full.

Schieffer and his contributors posit that reputable journalists are still out in force, and they remain on the side of “the fundamental ethical principles of journalism — telling verifiable truth, maintaining independence from sources and subjects, disclosing conflicts of interest, and serving the needs of citizens.”

Given that, it’s possible to imagine that we the people can survive even this.

Book Review: Unbelievable: My Front-Row Seat to the Craziest Campaign in American History

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This book review originally appeared in The Washington Independent Review of Books on 16 October 2017.

In Unbelievable, Katy Tur had me at her dedication. Rather than “For Mom” or “For Pooky-Bear,” it’s “For the love of God.”

Amen, sister.

In life, timing is everything, for good or ill. (“If I hadn’t decided to turn right at the corner just then, I never would have [met my soulmate] [been hit by that dump truck].”) Tur was a young NBC foreign correspondent living the life in London and spending romantic weekends in Paris, when a quick trip back to the States just happened to coincide with NBC’s decision to put someone on Donald Trump’s improbable (“ridiculous,” “hilarious”) presidential campaign.

Learning she was about to be tapped to follow him full-time, she called a veteran of earlier campaigns for advice. He told her to accept. “If you hate it, at least it will be short.”

Sure, it was funny at the time.

Trump’s bizarre love-hate relationship with Tur reared its head at the first campaign event she covered, just two weeks after his entry into the race. In the rain in a donor’s back yard in Bedford, New Hampshire, she was startled to hear him call her out, mid-speech, with a telling complaint, “I mean, Katy hasn’t even looked up once at me.”

Tur covered Trump longer than any other reporter, despite never having done political reportage before; without wanting to, she became part of the story she was covering. By not backing down in the face of personal attacks from her assigned candidate, or from the resulting death threats from his followers, she earned the respect of her colleagues, her own hashtag (#ImwithTur), and equal footing with her hero, Andrea Mitchell, as one of the indomitable “road warriors” of the campaign.

Plus, unlike most of the seasoned political reporters she found herself among, Tur, living as she was on a steady diet of packed and screaming Trump rallies across the U.S., never discounted the candidate’s chances of winning.

Tur takes an inspired approach to telling a story that we just finished living through — at least from our view in front of the stage. She slingshots back and forth between accounts from the long campaign (“May 23, 2015: 535 Days Until Election Day”) to the minute-by-minute ticking clock of Election Day itself. The stomach-clenching suspense is unexpected.

Along the way, she fills in the backstory of her from-birth training as a newshound and pulls the curtain back on the less-than-glamorous life of a press-corps journalist.

For those who still experience the election of 2016 as a raw, open wound, Tur’s intimate recounting may need to be read through splayed fingers. The rest of us just want video of the drunk Trump press corps’ early-morning election-day plane ride, with CNN’s Jeremy Diamond attempting to sled in the aisle during take-off, and Jim Acosta and Tur taking selfies with a passed-out Mark Halperin.

The author’s storytelling is earthy and accessible, and — as in the chapter, “Pop the Trunk. I’m Going to Run for It,” about dragging a couch-sized suitcase a mile through the snow to LaGuardia to beg her way onto an already-closed flight to Iowa — helps us to laugh through some of the otherwise truly chilling episodes she recounts of Trump’s whipping up his crowds against the “lying, disgusting” media, which often included his pointing out “back there…little Katy.”

In one telling episode, at a rally just days before Christmas in 2015, Tur spends a lovely, impromptu half-hour in the ladies room with a hair dresser and Trump supporter who offers to help her get her hair TV-ready. During the rally, Trump ruminates on the idea that Vladimir Putin kills reporters, and considers whether he might do the same. “I hate them, but I would never kill them.”

As usual, Trump’s press corps is corralled together behind barricades, as Tur observes, “caged in the center of the arena like a modern-day Roman Colosseum.” She notes the poinsettias, the wreaths, the holiday sweaters, “and the crowd is cheering about the idea of killing journalists…[T]o the lady who curled my hair in the bathroom, who is now somewhere in the crowd that is laughing at the idea of Trump killing me: Thanks, my hair looks great.”

Tur proved her mettle during a long and painful campaign, surviving that and much more — not the least of which was Trump’s grabbing her by the shoulders and kissing her, apparently because he liked her relatively softball coverage of him moments before on “Morning Joe.”

Unbelievable.