Donald Trump declared in a tweet on February 17 that the mainstream press is “the enemy of the American People.” This inflammatory remark was greeted by outrage mixed with anxiety. Chuck Todd of NBC’s Meet the Press spoke for many journalists when he responded, “This is not a laughing matter. I’m sorry, delegitimizing the press is un-American.”
Of course, it was just a tweet, thus far unaccompanied by any state-sponsored efforts to suppress the liberties of the media. Without excusing the president’s choice of words, it is important to understand the larger historical and political context. As uncouth as Trump’s rhetoric was, the fact remains that the government and journalists have long had an uneasy relationship, and prior presidents have, unlike Trump to date, used the power of the state to censor the press and even criminalize free speech.
The first and most egregious example of this pattern came in the early years of the republic. During the presidency of John Adams, the opposition had coalesced behind James Madison and Thomas Jefferson under the banner of the “Republican” party (different from the modern GOP). They placed special emphasis on the press, such that by 1800 Federalist senator Uriah Tracy of Connecticut lamented there was a Republican newspaper “in almost every town and county in the country.” The Federalist Congress responded by passing the Sedition Act, which imposed a maximum penalty of $2,000 and two years in jail for publishing “false, scandalous, or malicious writings” about the president or Congress, with the intent to “bring them . . . into contempt or disrepute; or to excite against them . . . the hatred of the good people of the United States.” Fortunately, this blatantly unconstitutional law expired in 1801, and the Jefferson administration did not renew it.
In prosecuting the Civil War, the Union government sometimes took a hard line against the media. In 1863, General Ambrose Burnside suspended publication of the Chicago Times because of “repeated expression of disloyal and incendiary sentiments,” an order that President Abraham Lincoln quickly rescinded amidst widespread protest. The New York World, initially sympathetic to Lincoln, was sold to a group of New York Democrats and became highly critical of the administration. In 1864, the government shut the publication down for two days.
During World War I, the Woodrow Wilson administration used the Espionage Acts of 1917 and 1918 to suppress the media. These laws effectively made it a crime to criticize the government or its prosecution of the war, and the administration halted anti-administration publications from being sent through the mail. During the New Deal, the sweeping nature of the National Recovery Act’s licensing system led newspaper publishers to worry that it would be a handmaiden used to censor the press, prompting extensive negotiations with the Franklin Roosevelt administration.
Presidents have also been prone to use “rough elbows” against the press—hardball tactics that fall short of systematic suppression, but nevertheless have a chilling effect. In 1908, the New York World accused President Theodore Roosevelt of “deliberate misstatements of facts” regarding the purchase of the Panama Canal, based on reports from the Indianapolis News. Roosevelt responded by accusing the papers of “a string of infamous libels,” and the World was charged in a New York district court in 1909, though the indictment was eventually quashed.
Lyndon Johnson’s administration lied to the press so often about the progress in Vietnam that the phrase “credibility gap” was coined to characterize the disconnect between what the White House said and what really was happening. Richard Nixon confided privately to Henry Kissinger that journalists “are the enemy, and we’re just gonna continue to use them, and never let them think that we think they’re the enemy.” His administration famously sought a court injunction to stop the release of the Pentagon Papers; it got one, but the Supreme Court eventually overturned the decision. More recently, Barack Obama’s Justice Department investigated Fox News’s James Rosen as a potential criminal co-conspirator for seeking classified information. In December 2016, James Risen of the New York Times blasted the administration for its “criminalization of the press” and said that Obama’s was “the most anti-press administration since the Nixon administration.”
Trump’s “war” on the media is substantially different from all these examples, at least so far. No news outlet has been prosecuted. No journalistic endeavor has been enjoined. Nobody has been put in jail. Trump’s assaults have been strictly rhetorical in nature and political in purpose. The president is calling the press the enemy in the same sense that Barack Obama encouraged liberals to “punish” their “enemies” at the ballot box and Hillary Clinton called Republicans her “enemies.” This is American factionalism at work—the difference being that rather than calling out the other party, Trump has turned his voting coalition’s ire against the press.
Or to be more precise, Trump is exploiting the ire that already exists. A September 2016 Gallup poll found that just 30 percent of independents and 14 percent of Republicans trust the mass media. During the election, Gallup determined that 80 percent of Republicans thought the media was biased in favor of Hillary Clinton, while most Democrats perceived no bias at all. By extending partisan warfare to the press, Trump is taking advantage of the fact that most Republicans, and many independents, seem to agree with University of Tennessee professor Glenn Reynolds that mainstream journalists are “Democratic operatives with bylines.”
Ultimately, the propriety of Trump’s remark hinges on one’s view of the press in 2017. Is it fairly calling the balls and strikes? If so, Trump’s tirade is unsettling, for the people need a press that can reliably inform them of the goings-on in government. But if the press is indeed part of the Democratic team, even though it wears the uniform of an umpire, Trump’s harangue is not nearly as outrageous. It’s just a continuation of the martial-style rhetoric that has characterized our politics for some time.
Either way, these are hardly dark days for American journalism. It is incumbent upon the president to be more considered in his rhetoric, but presidential rhetoric is only fearsome when it is supported by the heavy hand of the state. That is not hitherto the case with the Trump administration.
Jay Cost is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.
