Flake On “Fake News”
Jeff Flake gave a fiery speech on the Senate Floor today. Depending on where you get your news, his comparison of Trump with Stalin regarding the importance of a free press was either the crazy rantings of a retiring traitor to his party or a brave move to challenge his own party based on a genuine concerns and principles. Regardless of where you get your news, the President holding a “Fake News Award Show” is a unique event in the history of this country and I commend Mr. Flake for calling out the President’s actions.
It probably won’t get that much attention because it was designed to play off the president’s supposed Fake New Media Awards scheduled for today–which turned out itself to be an example of Fake Newspropagated by the White House. But Jeff Flake’s Senate floor speechattacking the president’s hostility to a free press was impressively blunt, and might be considered fearless for a politician of Trump’s own party if it were not for the fact that the Arizonan is retiring at the end of this year.
Flake’s most attention-grabbing passage compared Trump to Joseph Stalin for his application of the Soviet term “enemy of the people” for the news media. But perhaps his most important charge is that POTUS is becoming a role model and validator for tyrants around the world who would be perfectly happy closing down the Fourth Estate. He cited Syria’s Bashar Assad, the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte, Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro, and officials in Myanmar and Singapore, as using adopting the “fake news” slur from Trump in order to justify their destruction of independent media.
Not only has the past year seen an American president borrow despotic language to refer to the free press, but it seems he has in turn inspired dictators and authoritarians with his own language. This is reprehensible.
It’s also fair to observe that the U.S. has safeguards against actual tyranny that outstrip those of the countries where referring to “fake news media” may be quickly followed up by newsrooms being trashed, doors being kicked down, and journalists frog-marched off to jail. Though it’s hard to put anything past the 45th president, who seems to regard constitutional safeguards as an inconvenience, his aim in attacking the free press is probably to intimidate. As Paul Waldman noted today, however, it doesn’t seem to be working:
