The Associated Press and Reuters, two of the largest and most respected worldwide news agencies, were blocked from covering President Donald Trump’s petulant confrontation with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Feb. 28.
Yet somehow a correspondent for TASS, the Russian state news agency, was let into the Oval Office among a small, hand-picked pool of White House reporters.
The press office claimed later that he had not been approved and was escorted out after being discovered.
How did he get in?
More importantly, why were legitimate journalists kept out?
It’s all about control
The British historian H.R. Trevor-Roper answered that question in 1964 in reviewing a book, “The Captive Press in the Third Reich.”
“Dictators always seek to control the press,” he wrote, “and if they have secured real power, they seldom find it difficult to do so.”
Much has changed since Hitler’s rise to power in the 1930s, but one constant remains: the universal instinct of dictators to control what is written and said about them, and to manage how the population thinks and reacts. Censorship by whatever means necessary is their mode of survival.
Conquering the press was one of the first things Hitler did after coming to power in 1933. German newspapers and magazines quickly submitted to his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels.
Submitting to tyranny
“Like so much other evidence,” Trevor-Roper wrote, the book he was reviewing “proves that the Germans thoroughly deserved the tyranny to which they so tamely submitted.”
To what will America submit? What will we deserve?
Trump has already shattered precedents by choosing which media outlets will have daily access to him — something no president has done.
The independent White House Correspondents Association has traditionally chosen White House press “pool” reporters, who are allowed in the Oval Office and on presidential trips where space is limited. The Trump administration announced just a few days prior to the Zelenskyy-Trump blow up that it would now decide who gets such access.
It’s ridiculous to suggest, as the White House press secretary did, that the decision to take over which outlets take part in pool reports was simply a matter of making sure nontraditional outlets also had access. If that were the case, we would be seeing all manner of new voices in the White House briefing room, of various political ideologies. But of course, we are not — we are instead seeing far-right fringe figures from outlets such as Lindell TV, the media creation of conspiracy-addled MyPillow founder Mike Lindell, and even from the podcast of former Trump chief strategist Steve Bannon.
Former Trump officials, sending their gofers to ask questions of the Trump administration. It would be ridiculous were it not so concerning. The decision to strip the media of its ability to decide who gets access isn’t about expanding choices, as the White House claims. It’s about controlling what the American people learn about Trump. When the media is frozen out, you are too.
Trump has less power over U.S. media than Hitler had because of our First Amendment. But lawyers loyal to Trump are everywhere trying to undermine it, and the president’s own contempt for it is outspoken.
This threat is very real
Trump’s motives and some of his methods recall Hitler’s. To say that does not trivialize the Holocaust, as some timid folk insist. On the contrary, to ignore the similarities dangerously trivializes Trump.
His conduct also invites comparisons to Vladimir Putin, his favorite foreign dictator, who has banned or tamed almost all independent media in Russia.
Trump files spurious lawsuits to force his targets to defend themselves financially and legally and intimidate others from crossing him — or to surrender and settle, as ABC News did.
Meanwhile, Trump has his own social media and has browbeaten others, notably Facebook, into forsaking fact-checking. To see how Fox News “covers” him, you’d think he owns it.
The Washington Post no longer tallies his lies, as it did with some 30,000 of them during his first administration.
Controlling coverage
Post owner Jeff Bezos, whose space enterprise’s pursuit of government contracts is a glaring conflict, has directed its editorial page to concentrate on “personal liberties and free markets” and to print no contrary views on those topics.
Worst of all, Trump’s moves to control who covers him have moved beyond allowing the lunatic fringe into the briefing room. He has barred the AP from pool reports for not abiding by his childish demand to call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America.
Reuters was barred from a Cabinet meeting, along with the AP. Both had been permanent members of the press pool as they provide content to thousands of news outlets with no presence in D.C.
Room for MAGA media
Trump’s Department of Defense has evicted traditional media from their offices to make room for Trump’s favorites.
One Trump favorite is Brian Glenn, the streaming platform correspondent who called out Zelenskyy for not wearing a suit in Trump’s presence. Glenn used to work for a right-wing broadcasting network that during his tenure took $92,000 in “broadcast fees” from Trump’s political committee and his campaign.
That unethical relationship was exposed by S. V. Dáte, a White House reporter for the liberal Huffington Post, whom Trump kicked out of the White House press pool. Dáte is a former Palm Beach Post Tallahassee reporter and a Florida author.
No one has ever questioned the accuracy or fairness of the pool reports, which are distributed to other media. But that may change now that Trump is deciding who prepares them.
It would be a serious mistake to view Trump’s contempt for the media as only the media’s problem. It is everyone’s problem, because his goal is to control what Americans know.
That’s what dictators do.
The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writers Pat Beall and Martin Dyckman, and Executive Editor Gretchen Day-Bryant. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.
