Are media the enemy of the people?

Journalists have nearly always been criticized by the public, politicians and presidents. This has been the case ever since the printing press was invented in the 15th century. The media exist to report on and question the government, to hold those with power accountable for wrongdoings, so naturally, they are bound to make people uncomfortable.

However, President Donald Trump has been an outspoken critic of the mainstream media and this has led to a shift in the way they are perceived. Perhaps most notably, he has brought back a phrase loaded with historical context to condemn journalists: enemy of the people.

The phrase started out as the title of a comedic play and was later used by war revolutionaries, dictators, communists and various political and military leaders such as Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, who popularized it during his reign over Soviet Russia. This phrasing has varied over the years, but it has kept the same general meaning:

An enemy of the people is someone who questions or goes against a powerful figure or group and must be shut down and brought back into compliance to ensure said power’s rule. In this instance, it is the media who negatively cover Trump and his administration.

“I think in the journalism profession having someone call you out like that is a badge of honor,” said Dr. Sabryna Cornish, assistant professor of journalism. “You have made the leader of the free world nervous and he knows he can’t get away with stuff — we’re going to call him out on it.”

Trump is by no means the first American politician or president to criticize the media; however, he may be one of the most persistent. Cornish pointed out that former president Richard Nixon frequently dismissed the media just before the Watergate scandal broke. “(The Washington Post) knew they were doing their job right, they knew there was something there and it changed the course of history.”

The Trump administration has created a new vernacular surrounding the media: fake news, alternative facts, corrupt, disgusting, lying terrible people. These words and phrases have already become ingrained in everyday discourse surrounding the media, so much so that many people just brush them off.

However, it is unusual that the president routinely turns reporters away from press conferences, dismisses their reporting as false and uses catchphrases like “fake news media” to discredit their profession. According to IPSOS, 29 percent of Americans agreed that “the news media is the enemy of the American people.”

Does this mean that Trump’s deflection of the media is working? His fake news label tends to land on stories that do not portray him positively. By making the media out to be the enemy, he is influencing the way the public may view them. To Cornish, this is an offensive strategy.

“All of the people I know who are journalists … do it because they feel like it’s their public service,” she said, noting that, contrary to popular belief, there is little pay or fame in journalism. “They do it because they feel that is a role that is super important so people can get the information they need to make decisions in a well-informed way.”

“The whole point of the media is to figure out what’s going on in the government and to call people out on things they shouldn’t be doing,” Cornish said. “So how does that make you an enemy of the people?”

Cornish is not sure if it is intentional or not, but she notices similarities between Trump and others who have used this phrase.

“One of the first things that dictators want to do is to have control of the media,” Cornish said. “That’s the best way to control the information that people get, so people can only get what that dictator thinks is relevant.”

Dr. Kay O’Donnell, associate professor of journalism, said that Trump’s dislike of the media differs greatly from when he was first starting out. “It’s the ultimate hypocrisy because if you look at his background, he has sought the attention of the media from his very early days as a businessman in New York. He has always understood the power of the media and wanted as much attention, as much as he could get of himself out there, and he knew the only way he could do it was through the media.”

Now, however, Trump actively tries to shut it down any time there is negative coverage of him. Whether it is Twitter rants about the dishonesty of the press or calling individual reporters names (“low I.Q. Crazy Mika,” “Psycho Joe,” “Sleepy Eyes Chuck Todd”) Trump has forged a new narrative about journalists.

“I think that the dumbing down of journalists and reducing them to a catchphrase or nickname and not focusing on the work they do is discrediting,” O’Donnell said. “I think some of them may start using it as a badge of honor.”

While journalists have been able to withstand the criticism and name-calling, a more dangerous threat has begun to increase: the targeting and harassment of the press.

O’Donnell pointed to the recent murder of Bulgarian reporter Viktoria Marinova and Mexico’s ranking as one of the most dangerous countries for journalists as well as the escalating situation around the death of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.

Khashoggi was murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey on Oct. 2. Initially, Saudi officials said that he left the consulate alive. On Oct. 20, after weeks of differing explanations, the state admitted that Khashoggi died in an altercation.

However, on Oct. 25 the story changed again. Attorney General Shaikh Suood bin Abdullah Al Mo’jab said the killing was premeditated and carried out by a group of men with ties to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Multiple investigations are still underway, but as this situation unfolds journalists must face the fact that their work can be dangerous. Khashoggi, an outspoken critic of the Saudi government, often wrote about this. In his final column for the Washington Post, he discussed the dangers of living in a country where the government silences the media. The power of his words in this piece are intensified now more than ever.

“When you see spikes like this, of violence against journalists … you need to watch that it’s happening in places other than your backyard because it’s showing a shift of other rulers seeing that the power of the press may be getting too strong in their country and this is the way to rein them in,” O’Donnell said.

According to global research from the Committee to Protect Journalists, 67 journalists and media workers have been killed so far in 2018, 262 journalists were imprisoned in 2017 and 61 journalists went missing between 2016 and 2017. While this field has always had an element of danger, the current climate and rhetoric surrounding the media have changed things.

“It used to be being a journalist was never a job where you had to worry about ‘Are people going to come into my newsroom and shoot me?’” Cornish said. “That wasn’t really your biggest issue; your biggest issue for the past few decades was ‘Am I going to get sued?’”

While neither the June shooting at the Capital Gazette newspaper in Annapolis, Md. or the violent threats made against the Boston Globe in August are a new sort of attack on the media, they come at a time when the victims have been referred to as enemies.

“If I say ‘you’re my enemy,’ you understand it is a bad thing,” Cornish said. “Saying enemy of the people puts media in a different context and I think allows people to behave in specific ways than they might not if that phrase weren’t being used.”

This is not to say that people are only acting out because of what the current administration is doing. “There’s a long history of irate citizens coming in to the local paper and wanting to hurt people or shoot people, it’s just not a new thing,” O’Donnell said. “It just kind of goes with political and social tides.”

She is surprised that there have not been more problems, but also believes that social media serves as an outlet for people who are frustrated with the media. “They can vent some rage and some ugliness and hate there and feel like ‘OK I’m done’ and not have to go down to the local paper and throw a rock through the window.”

This is something that has happened at several newspapers O’Donnell has worked at. “It’s unsettling but it happens,” she said. “People write in every paper and every news organization across the country, something is written every day and someone’s not gonna like something.”

On a smaller scale, people are simply just unsure of who to believe. When the president of the United States is saying that the news is fake and that journalists are the enemy, but the media are saying otherwise, tension begins to build.

“I think it’s definitely weird in this country now where you see a lot more people with very strong opinions about things and a lot more arguments about that,” Cornish said. “That’s a great thing to have for democracy. We want discourse from all sides but as far as changing opinions or changing how those things are used, we may be stuck for a couple years.”

There is no definitive way to correct the narrative around the media. In fact, it is likely that this will go on until the next administration enters the White House and the rhetoric begins to fade away.

“I don’t think it’s a bad thing to shake people up in the journalism world,” O’Donnell said. “I’ve read several reports that there are more young people going into journalism … same thing happened post-Watergate and that gives me hope that people do see the value of it.”

Enemy of the people or not, journalists work to serve the people and that is something that cannot be denied. “I don’t believe any journalist who’s doing the job correctly with an ethical compass is (the enemy of the people)…it’s just the exact opposite,” O’Donnell said.

“I have not been on a Pulitzer Prize-winning team or written award-winning headlines, but I look back on all of my years, whether it’s editing copy, taking transcriptions from Central-American correspondents, writing a cutline, being involved in news budget meetings, I look back on all of that and know that I helped to shape and provide good information, what our community needed to know on a certain day and the next day we got up and tried it again,” she said.