What happens when democracy loses its watchdogs

We need to start paying attention to the cumulative effect of the thousand tiny cuts slowly killing us. In the last decade, our country has changed so much as to be unrecognizable to those of us who came of age in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Yes, I am dating myself.

I say this while fully realizing that in my callow youth, National Guardsmen killed protestors at Kent State University, and that police shot and killed activists at numerous protests and riots. I saw it on television. I read about it in the newspapers. I witnessed some events myself.

I say this remembering the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., John and Bobby Kennedy, and Malcolm X. I say this remembering the Vietnam War, the Cold War, the threat of global annihilation. School busing to achieve integration. The New York Yankees, UCLA basketball, the Boston Celtics and the Green Bay Packers. 

And I make this claim and offer the warning because today you can no longer even get sports news in the Washington Post. This week Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Post — the publication that broke the Watergate scandal — decided to kill the newspaper. Forgive me if I think the two news stories are linked and represent the culmination of everything the far-right has tried to do to the press since Richard Nixon irrevocably stained national politics.

Bezos remains one of the richest people on the planet. But he has no stomach to invest in or improve the Washington Post, which costs him pennies on the dollar. He lacks the grit and, more importantly, the civic responsibility to improve the Post. Instead he has the grift and social responsibility of Donald Trump. Thus the mass layoffs, more than 300 in all, or 30% of the paper’s workforce, that were announced on Wednesday.

“These layoffs are not inevitable,” the Washington Post Guild said in a statement. “A newsroom cannot be hollowed out without consequences for its credibility, its reach and its future.”

In its own statement, the Post characterized the move as part of “a number of difficult but decisive actions [being taken] today for our future.” The intent is purportedly “to strengthen our footing and sharpen our focus on delivering the distinctive journalism that sets The Post apart and, most importantly, engages our customers.”

Executive Editor Matt Murray said, “We can’t be everything to everyone.”  However, it looks like the Post can instead be nothing to everyone — and that’s where it is headed.

Coming from Louisville, I grew up with the words of Robert Worth Bingham thrust at me every time I walked into the Courier-Journal headquarters: “I have always regarded the newspapers owned by me as a public trust and have endeavored so to conduct them as to render the greatest public service.”

Or perhaps you prefer fiction. There’s Charles Foster Kane, an extremely rich, crusading newspaper owner who is chided by a friend for losing more than a million dollars a year. Kane smiles and says at that rate he might have to worry in 60 years.

The Washington Post in reality is not as good as the fiction of “Citizen Kane,” let alone Bingham’s reality. If Bezos had any of that pluck, we certainly would not be reading about the Post’s pending demise.

The decisions made by Bezos and his team weren’t made to stop the bleeding, but rather to bring about the quick execution of the venerable newspaper. Closing your sports section is self-defeating. Washington, D.C., is a robust sports town, and it deserves more, not less, coverage. Many readers will pick up the newspaper explicitly for the daily local and professional sports coverage and read the rest of the paper later — if at all. That activity is duplicated on many news websites; large numbers of people subscribe solely for local, regional and national sports.

Naturally, the Post also killed its flagship podcast. So much for the future of journalism. So much for future profits. These moves were made to kill the Post. No book section? Bezos made his fortune selling books online. Forget arts, culture and reading. No foreign coverage, and certainly no coverage of Amazon, the company Bezos owns. 

Vast news deserts with no local coverage exist across the country, and independent reporting of any issue, concern, pastime, government action, youth activity or local PTA is nearly impossible to find. Bezos just insured us all that we will have even less news to read in the future. 

During the ‘60s we were far better informed, though we did not have the internet. Some argue that the rise in interconnectivity has destroyed our culture. Just watch “Pluribus” if you need a tutorial. Reality, however, isn’t as sterile as today’s popular fiction. Human beings as a whole do not employ the same ethics a responsible newspaper does — though today many of us chide the press solely when the news is unfavorable to our own personal prejudices. We are quite more tolerable when they start telling us the truth by agreeing with us.

Individually, many of us choose to remain anonymous while publicly spewing the most venomous insults at those with whom we disagree. Those insults are fed intravenously and instantaneously into the body politic due to our interconnectivity. It may be a thrill show and a shallow endorphin rush, but the one thing that it isn’t is journalism, which we still happily criticize. Journalism requires thought, patience, critical thinking and the application of the scientific method to mass communication. That’s exactly what Trump, Bezos and others do not want.

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The fall of journalism is the fall of a country. That is what is at stake. That is why we need to pay attention. For a democracy to exist, as those who founded this nation taught us, we need a well-informed electorate. Today? We are misinformed and disinformed — and all we do is curse each other. Name the conspiracy and there are millions who believe it. You can find articles validating whatever you think in the online repository of human information on the internet that is readily available to anyone with a smart phone.  

The result, as one of my favorite socially critical musicians, Jim Carroll, told us, is that “Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.” You can believe you live next door to alien neighbors who believe in a flat earth. You can believe 25 million violent criminal immigrants are driving loose in caravans across the country and paying $1.99 for a gallon of gas while taking all of our jobs and simultaneously remaining unemployed so as to sap our social services. All of them voted twice in the last election, and their actions are dictated through the antifa domestic terrorist network. Ask artificial intelligence and you can read worse.

The death of journalism is no accident. The government, at least since Ronald Reagan’s time, has actively tried to kill it. Trump may get the credit for the kill, but it was already weakened. 

That gets us to Trump’s latest cut aimed at the fourth estate.

He has told us more than once it is time to move past the Jeffrey Epstein files. The puerile salaciousness of those files almost guarantees that will not happen. So far, the millions of documents have shown us that rich people live by their own rules, and those include human trafficking, child abuse and behavior that would make the Roman gods envious and cause the nephilim of the Old Testament to blush in disbelief. The old adage is true: Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. In this case, Russian President Vladimir Putin apparently was very happy to keep a file on everyone who ever played ball on Epstein’s private island in the Caribbean. Trump wants us to forget all that.

So when CNN’s Kaitlan Collins asked him about this Tuesday, the president got angry. He told Collins that CNN should be ashamed of her and that she never smiles. I honestly don’t know who would smile while asking a question about pedophiles engaged in child sexual abuse, but that’s not the point here.

The point is that no one supported Collins. Mouths went silent while the president glided on to other questions. 

Our companies have failed us by showing fealty to Trump. But if reporters don’t stand up and support their colleagues when the questions get tough, then they are guilty of the same crime as the media owners. Of course, in the Trump White House, most of the press pool is filled with sycophants.

Vice President JD Vance, Trump’s highest-ranking sycophant, eagerly sided with his boss, telling Megyn Kelly on Wednesday that Collins should lighten up and “have some fun.” It remains one of the most tone-deaf comments Vance has made — and he’s made many. 

I am not suggesting that someone should have stood up and defended Collins’ honor. She’s a pro. She knows what she’s doing and has been asking Trump good questions since his first administration. I am suggesting that the reporters in the room should have followed up on her question. That is how reporters show solidarity, and how we serve the public. If the president doesn’t answer the question — and this was surely one of the most important questions he’s been asked recently — then it necessitated every other reporter in that room to pick up on that thread and ask the question until we got a satisfactory answer.

Forty years ago, when I first showed up in the White House during the second Reagan administration, that’s how we usually played it. Joe Lockhart, one of former President Bill Clinton’s press secretaries, said he always worried about hearing multiple reporters following up on the same question. He felt like he was “caught in the crosshairs.”

But Trump’s ability to buy off or intimidate most of the press serves a greater purpose than avoiding the bullseye. He has made it clear that he would like to cancel the midterm elections. He wished he had seized ballot boxes after he lost the 2020 presidential election. He has made it clear that he would like the Department of Justice to operate as an extension of his political will. 

Recently, the president showed up on the podcast of former FBI deputy director Dan Bongino. There Trump took things a step further: He wants Republicans to take over voting in Democratic-run states and cities. “These people were brought to our country to vote and they vote illegally,” he said. “Amazing that the Republicans aren’t tougher on it. The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over.’ We should take over the voting in at least as many as 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”

The more compromised the traditional press becomes, the less likely average voters will be aware of what their government is actually doing and why — thus making it more likely that Trump’s midterm initiatives will succeed. Then, the game is over. 

Meanwhile, independent media has sprung up on both sides of the aisle and are usually untethered by the standards of its less independent parent, the corporate media. Those who run the government love this. They can create their own reality and force feed it to us via the interconnectivity that is now choking us.

This is another step into totalitarianism that many of us have hardly noticed — the same way many of us have missed all the other small steps in that direction since the early 1980s. The numerous small cuts are killing us.  

No, democracy doesn’t die in darkness. It dies in the light of day in the C suite as the gravely-wounded republic puts the gun to its own head and pulls the trigger — lulled into the belief, fostered by the government, that pulling the trigger will bring greater profits.

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