A retired admiral who oversaw the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, and who this week said President Trump’s attacks on the media are the “greatest threat to democracy in my lifetime,” told journalism students, “We need you now more than ever.”
Retired Adm. William McRaven, a Navy SEAL and head of U.S. Special Operations Command who is now the chancellor of the University of Texas System, wrote that Trump’s comments go beyond the barricade mentality of the government that tries to hide information from the public.
“I viewed it as perhaps the greatest threat to democracy in my lifetime,” McRaven wrote in a blog post, reiterating the message he gave to a group of students and faculty this week at Moody College of Communication at UT Austin, his alma mater. He was responding to Trump’s tweet last Friday calling the “FAKE NEWS media” “the enemy of the American people.”
“In my sixty years, most of the serious threats to our nation have come from the outside: the Cold War, the Vietnam War, terrorism and the wars that followed. While at times, these external pressures encouraged some within our government to adopt a barricade mentality — hiding information from the public, acting secretly outside the bounds of the law, and encouraging behavior that had an extralegal feel to it — never has the government openly challenged the idea of a free press.”
McRaven, who also served as the commander of terror-hunting Joint Special Operations Command and is one of the top anti-terrorism operatives alive, said the media does make mistakes but a free press is the country’s “most important institution.”
He called on journalists to be truthful and speak truth to power, eliminating bias and holding themselves accountable.
“As an Admiral, and now as a Chancellor, I haven’t always enjoyed being asked tough questions,” McRaven wrote. “But being held accountable by the press has only made me and the organizations I lead better. Just as it has made America better.”
