Media must realize a key target of fascism is … media

They should act like they know Trump has made them targets

There are many victims of the MAGA movement. Women seeking control of their own bodies. Black people demanding voting rights. Poor people needing health care. 

And if Donald Trump achieves the dictatorial powers he seeks, another group of victims will be journalists.

“We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections,” said Kash Patel, a Trump acolyte in line for a major role if Republicans take back the White House.

Trump posted on social media last September that “the Fake News Media should pay a big price for what they have done to our once great country,” and that NBC and MSNBC should be investigated for treason.

Yet the news media are underplaying the fact that they themselves are MAGA targets. Maybe they don’t want to be part of the story. Maybe they don’t take the threat seriously. But for whatever reason, they’re not doing enough to stick up for themselves, their profession, and the public’s right to know.

Journalists – and Americans in general – sometimes take freedom of speech for granted. But Eddie Monteclaro didn’t.

Eddie was my co-worker when I was a young copy editor at the Chicago Sun-Times. A mild-mannered and diligent editor, Eddie rarely talked about his background as a journalist who had fled the Philippines to avoid arrest after Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law there in 1972.

But one night around midnight, after we had closed up the Sun-Times’ final edition, Eddie and I got to talking. He told me Marcos hadn’t started out as an autocrat, and I responded: “Well, you know what they say: Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

“Believe it or not, Marcos used to repeat that quote,” Eddie said. And as we sat at the copy desk, in the old Sun-Times Building that is now the site of Trump Tower Chicago, we talked about how Marcos became the dictator he had warned his people about.

After the Filipino tyrant was deposed in 1986, Eddie made it back to his homeland and became editor-in-chief of the Manila Times. But only a year after returning, he died of a heart attack at age 58. A dictator had stolen years in which he could have been serving his beloved country.

It’s common in other parts of the world for journalists to risk and sometimes lose their lives trying to inform the public. It’s both horrifying and routine in the nightmarish version of Russia run by Trump’s friend Vladimir Putin. And a couple of weeks ago, two Tunisian journalists were sentenced to a year in jail for criticizing the government.

The New York Times ran an odd story a month ago about “gallows humor with a dark edge” in which the DC elite – including people at “the swirl of Washington soirees surrounding the recent White House Correspondents’ Association dinner“ – speculated about which country they would flee to if Trump won and imposed a dictatorship. 

Which means many people in the U.S. media know a fascist threat when they see it. They know being a journalist in a dictatorship means being a toady or a prison inmate or a corpse. I just wish they’d worry more about exposing the fascist threat now – before it’s too late – and less about treating politics as an intramural sport in which they’re obligated to depict the red and blue teams as equals. 

Particularly dangerous are commentators who tell us to take it easy.

Politico ran an essay by Turkish journalist Asli Aydintasbas earlier this year assuring Americans that “panic is unnecessary” because “another four years of Trump is not enough time to turn America into a dictatorship.”

John R. MacArthur, publisher of Harper’s, took aim at “the screaming elite’s Trump phobia” and said there was no cause for alarm about a MAGA takeover because “Trump does not have the intellectual capacity or concentration needed to plan such a coup.”

A CNN opinion piece by author William Cooper said the “widespread fear that Trump will actually be a dictator … is misplaced.” Rather than an autocracy, he wrote, it would be a “chaosracy” in which some government institutions function democratically and some don’t. 

It seems foolhardy to downplay the negative possibilities – to assume that a person in power won't do what he threatens to do. Former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, who supposedly knows the ex-president well, assured us in 2021 that Trump was bluffing about seeking a return to the White House. Cohen was very, very wrong.

The worst-case scenario for American journalists is violence and imprisonment. But there are less drastic ways to harass the press and render it ineffective. Trump tried to revoke CNN correspondent Jim Acosta’s press pass, for example. If the courts hadn’t stopped him, he would’ve done that to more reporters. Trump has also talked about making it easier to win libel suits against the media, probably by getting the Republican-stacked Supreme Court to undo the 1964 New York Times vs. Sullivan ruling, which helps prevent the super-rich from suing news outlets out of business.

Another threat is that government harassment simply makes the news overly cautious and boring. That, in fact, is what happened in Nazi Germany.

Soon after Adolf Hitler’s takeover, he forced Jewish publishers to sell or close their newspapers and banned all “non-Aryan” editors and even editors who were Aryan if they were married to Jews. The chilling of public discourse made newspapers incredibly boring. Circulation plummeted. 

Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels decided this was the editors’ fault. They were “cringing lap dogs,” he declared, and needed to summon the “courage to criticize constructively” and perk up their publications.

Ehm Welk of the Gruene Post took Goebbels’ comments to heart. He wrote an editorial lightly complaining about government oversight of the press and suggesting that Goebbels was “too far removed from the public.”

Welk’s piece was so interesting that the Gruene Post was suspended for three months and he was sent to a concentration camp. 

Welk’s fate was far better than millions of other victims of the Nazis. He was freed at the urging of foreign correspondents at a time when the Third Reich still cared what foreigners thought. But Welk gave up writing about politics and instead produced a best-selling humorous novel full of colorful characters in a fictional village during simpler times. He had been disarmed as a journalist.

Today’s media need to defend themselves against Trump’s threat to free speech. If he succeeds in imposing an American dictatorship, the authors of humorous small-town novels will be safe. But critics of the propaganda minister won’t be.