Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt recently announced that the White House will henceforth be deciding which news outlets will be included in the Press Pool given access to the president’s various public pronouncements. For decades, she said, the White House Correspondents Association [the W.H.C.A.], a group of D.C. journalists representing the “legacy media,” had more or less guaranteed that most questions directed at the president in power would be implicitly Leftist in bias. Now, Leavitt declared, the voice of the People will be heard, such online outlets as The Blaze News Network being included in a process which clearly has much to do with the flow of public opinion! Stating that the mainstream media would continue to be a part of that process, she was clearly implying the new protocol to be an endorsement of journalistic freedom rather than a tyrannical effort to thwart it.
But what of Trump’s banishment of the Associated Press from the Oval Office simply because it refused to bow before his renaming of The Gulf of Mexico? This would seem to be an incredibly trivial reason for ostracizing a service that feeds thousands of news entities across the planet! I have no problem with the conservative belief that the Left has been controlling the media for decades. But is Karoline Leavitt’s recent announcement grounds for optimism that so-called cancel culture is now a thing of the past, or merely a ploy allowing Donald Trump to cancel any point of view with which he does not agree? Freedom of Speech is an integral aspect of any healthy Democracy and Trump’s tyrannical impulses are no more valid than those of the tyrannical Left!
Andrew Philips of the decidedly “progressive” Toronto Star, recently wrote an opinion piece entitled “There’s plenty of hypocrisy to go around” in which he admitted that in the past “many on the left were indeed happy to dismiss free speech as at best outmoded and at worst racist.” This is no far right piece of misinformation and it is of course what has prompted Trump to want to drain the “swamp” for which he has such disdain. But replacing one tyrannical regime with another makes no sense whatsoever, and the Left’s fear that Leavitt’s announcement may signal the beginning of a right wing assault on journalistic freedom is certainly understandable given Trump’s ludicrous attack on the Associated Press.
Recently, on CNN, conservative Scott Jennings mocked the outrage of the W.H.C.A., pointing out that in 2023, when Biden revoked the passes of 442 journalists, it had expressed little concern for freedom of the press. Trump, he argued, is at least transparent in his actions, willingly responding to over 1000 questions from journalists in his first month in office. But the fact that Biden, according to Jennings, entertained just 141 questions from the press in his first month, hardly validates the integrity of Trump’s intentions. His open admission of his plans for Greenland, Panama and Canada doesn’t make them any less objectionable. Hitler was “transparent” yet a monster! The next few months will no doubt reveal whether Trump is in fact the dictatorial jerk the Left has been calling him all along.
My point is simply that true conservatives committed to the Rational Principles essential to any healthy Democracy, must be just as willing to denounce Trump should he violate those principles as they were to vilify Biden for abusing his powers in turning institutions such as the D.O.J. and FBI into little more than weaponized arms of the Democratic Party.