The Founding Fathers, those old guys in the dusty white wigs from 1775, they knew what they were doing.
They wanted to create a country where there wouldn’t be a dictator holding sway over all of the people and making every law by himself.
They were the guys who risked life and limb to fight the tyrannical rule of King George III of England. You remember all of this, I’m sure, from your middle school civics and history classes.
While waging a bloody and devastating revolutionary war against the despot, the Founders sat down to craft a constitution for a nation that would be run by a balance of interests. They wanted a chief executive (the President), but they wanted his powers to be balanced by a broad legislature and an appointed court.
When the war was over and the individual states began to fear a loss of their powers, the Bill of Rights was created.
The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution read:
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”
Freedom of religion, of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom to petition for a redress of grievance. And freedom of the press.
Powerful rights. Powerful words.
Thomas Jefferson once said:
“The only security of all is in a free press.”
So it is particularly alarming when we hear President-elect Trump referring to journalists as “lying,” “dishonest,” and “disgusting.”
This is a classic move by anti-democratic tyrants. They try to suppress the unbiased journalism whose goal is to ask them the hard questions, and to act as an intermediary between the powerful and the people.
So when former Vice President Dick Cheney gets in on the effort to suppress the free media, we should all be alarmed and ready to strike back.
Cheney was the right-hand man to former President G.W. Bush during the early days of the Iraq War. He was no friend of the press who questioned him extensively about his holdings in the Halliburton Company, which made millions off of the war.
Cheney was recently interviewed on CNN, and was asked what he thought of the President-elect’s casual attitude toward social media. He was asked about Trump’s habit of sending out impulsive tweets in the middle of the night, without factual back up or any sense of political propriety.
Cheney laughed and said that while it’s important for the President-elect to take care and think about what he’s doing, the biggest issue is how uncomfortable people are about Trump circumventing the press entirely.
“I think one of the reasons people get so concerned about the tweets is it’s sort of a way around the press. It’s modern era, modern technology. He’s at the point where we don’t need you guys anymore.”
But as a democratically based society, we will always need free journalism. We will always need reporters to ask the detailed questions that we don’t know to ask. If we want to remain a free and open society, we will always need a free press to investigate behind the scenes, and to keep our elected officials as honest as possible.
No wonder both Trump and Cheney are hoping that they can marginalize the media.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwSpSxC06_A
Featured image via YouTube screengrab.
