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Eduardo del Buey
Foto: Screenshot from the film
La Jornada Maya

Martes 13 de marzo, 2018

I have just come from seeing [i]The Post[/i], arguably the best film about the media I have seen in a long time. Steven Spielberg did an excellent job of bringing the issue of freedom of the press to life and underscoring the dangers of a U.S. President and an administration that sees the free media as “the enemy” or, worse, in today’s terms, as “fake news”.

These are key issues in a world in which autocratic leaders are enjoying a comeback after the democratic “spring” of the 1990’s.

The late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black once opined that, “The Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to bare the secrets of government and inform the people”.

Ignorance of the truth is the main ally of the autocratic leader.

And ignorance is not only the purview of the uneducated.

Those who believe that they can control the tyrant are even more to blame than those who vote from a position of sheer ignorance.

Those who believe that they can control the tyrants that they in fact enable are wrong.

In the 1920’s and 30’s, the German military and industrial class believed that they could control Hitler and his gang. History and events proved them terribly wrong.

The first thing the tyrant does is reduce the space for freedom of thought and expression until it disappears. This starts with controls over the media and the stifling of truthful reporting. It ends with people being exposed only to propaganda and, as George Orwell wrote in his seminal book 1984, believing that 2+2=5.

Does any of this ring true today?

Myanmar has arrested Reuters journalists for doing their jobs.

Venezuela has expelled CNN and barred it from its airways for simply doing its job. It also closes down all of the opposition media.

North Korea and Cuba, Russia and China, all forbid the existence of a free media and deny it the right to do its job.

Turkey has jailed hundreds of journalists on trumped up charges of participating in a coup attempt, as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan consolidates his hold on power.

Hungarian prime Minister Viktor Orban is proud to be turning Hungary into an “illiberal” democracy, as are his friends in Poland. He has eliminated a free judiciary, and curtailed the freedom of action of civil society, changing both the constitution and the law to meet his objectives.

It remains to be seen what action the European Union will take to ensure it remains a union of democracies.

And what is the media’s job?

The truthful reporting of facts, and opinion pieces designed to stimulate discussion rather than stifle it.

Indeed, the journalist reports the truth, and keeps opinions out of the report.

The editorialist or columnist expresses personal ideas.

When these become conflated, the truth suffers, and the confidence of the audience diminishes.

A major difference we have today is the explosion of social media. This has allowed disinformation, or outright lies, to permeate cyberspace. The fact that people believe these lies because they are on the web is a clear and present danger to us all. Indeed, in the past, we had television and radio. But these media were highly regulated, and their journalists highly respected by the public.

Today, cyberspace is easy for experts to manipulate, as we have seen with Russian hacking into elections in several countries recently. Disinformation on the web allows lies and falsehoods to reach four billion people instantly – and many believe what they see on the internet.

What to believe?

Hannah Arendt once wrote, “A people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.”

And the autocrat increasingly does as he or she pleases as the people’s will to resist is stripped away by lies, disinformation, and censorship.

In The Post, Spielberg underscores the determination of successive U.S. administrations to lie to their citizens about the conduct and course of the war in Vietnam. Knowing full well that the war was unwinnable, they nevertheless continued to send young soldiers to die to defend a concept of “honor” that was in itself surreal. In the end, the U.S. lost Vietnam thousands of lives after it should have, and Vietnam today remains a communist dictatorship, although peace has been made between the two former enemies.

Spielberg depicts Richard Nixon’s attempts to stifle the media in the courts, threatening and carrying out legal action. Fortunately, the courts were strong and the judiciary independent, and didn’t let the President get his way.

In the end, Nixon barred [i]The Washington Post[/i] from any access to the White House or to his officials.

[i]The Post[/i] got its sweet revenge by breaking the news about and running with the Watergate saga that led to Nixon’s resignation in 1974.

In those days, the media was free, strong, and independent.

In those days, the judiciary was independent, and few political leaders attacked their freedom.

In those days, they were seen as guardians of the truth.

Who are today’s guardians?

Check the mainstream media and the judiciary who, despite attacks by Trump, and actions aimed at curtailing their freedom, continue to survive in this brave new world we inhabit.

They continue do an excellent job of reporting and adjudicating, although sometimes they give too much space to Trump’s surrogates at the expense of more democratically oriented political leaders. Despite the strong and concerted opposition of many in government and the right-wing media, they call out the administration and its proxies – FOX News, Breitbart, and many of the President’s enablers in the Republican Party -- who are determined to limit free speech to only those messages that Donald Trump wants to hear.

So, if you need reminding about how the free media does its job and defends the rights of all to the truth, don’t miss [i]The Post.[/i]

This is the right film for today’s reality and, hopefully, an indication that the current atmosphere of antimedia bias by many leaders around the world can be brought to a halt by strong action on the part of civil society.

A pliant media is an ally of autocrats everywhere.

So is a pliant electorate


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