If the president lies…

 
Carol Giacomo, a member of the New York Times editorial board, delivered this year’s Mehmet Ali Birand lecture, an annual event organized by Punto24 Platform for Independent Journalism (P24) to mark May 3 World Press Freedom Day.
 
The event also paid tribute to more than 160 journalists who are currently behind bars in Turkey as P24 employees read out their names one by one ahead of the lecture. “Our colleagues who have been imprisoned because of their words are not alone,” was the message from the P24. “Journalism is not a crime. We will continue the legal struggle for their freedom.”
 

The memorial lecture, the fourth held in memory of late Turkish journalist Mehmet Ali Birand, was hosted by the Swedish Consulate in İstanbul. P24 founding member Andrew Finkel and Swedish Consul-General of İstanbul Therese Hyden greeted the audience, followed by remarks in memory of Birand by his widow, Cemre Birand, and P24 President Hasan Cemal.
 
“I missed you very much. I missed your friendship, I missed your scoops,” Cemal said of Birand, a colleague and a long-time friend. “I missed democracy, I missed freedom, I missed rule of law. Those were the values that we fought for years and years in our lifetime. But I am sad, Mehmet Ali, very sad and feeling very lonely, because the days that I have waited for all my life never came.”

Giacomo’s lecture, titled “The Challenges Facing Journalism in the Age of Trump,” discussed difficulties of keeping the press free both in the United States and Turkey.
 
“The biggest threat to a free press in my country right now is the lies, lies and repeated lies emanating from the president,” said Giacomo. “Sure, all politicians shade the truth, omit facts, even lie now and then. But Mr. Trump and his administration have made misrepresentation, obfuscation and lack of access a tool of governing.”
 
The seasoned journalist also commented on the situation in Turkey. Although the perceived threats against journalism have expanded dramatically in the United States, “American journalists are not at risk in the same way that Turkish journalists are,” she said. “Mr. Trump has not launched a wave of arrests nor moved to close media outlets or to have cronies take them over… They enjoy solid protections because of the Constitution and an independent judiciary.”
 
Ultimately, she said, “if democracy is to revive in Turkey, it will do so because millions of Turks … will find ways to reclaim their rights and freedoms, including a free press.”
 
The full text of Giacomo’s speech is as follows:
 
The Challenges Facing Journalism in the Age of Trump
 
I come to speak to you today at a momentous time for both of our countries.
 
There are many aspects to that, but I’m here to talk primarily about free speech and press freedoms in recognition of World Press Freedom Day and the late great Turkish journalist, Mehmet Ali Birand.
 
As we all are painfully aware, freedom of the press – the ability of journalists to report the news that informs and animates citizens in a free society – is under serious strain, even attack.
 
That is true certainly in Turkey and the United States, and I will discuss them more specifically in a few minutes. But this grim phenomenon also exists in many other countries – from Russia and China to Pakistan and Colombia.
 
At the extreme end of the spectrum, journalists are being killed at an unprecedented rate – 1,234 since 1992, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists – with Iraq, Syria and the Philippines leading the list of deadliest countries.
 
But many more journalists, in these and scores of other countries, have had to endure arrests, torture, threats and harassment as they pursued their work. IN its latest report (4/19/17), Freedom House concluded that press freedom worldwide has deteriorated to its lowest point in 13 years.
 
Democracy cannot exist without an unfettered press. Power-hungry leaders seeking to accrue more power and control know that all too well.
 
But we know that citizens are entitled to have as much independent and truthful information as possible about their communities and countries, especially about the governments and other power centers – banks, academic institutions, corporations – that exercise influence over their lives, our lives.
 
We also know that citizens cannot make informed choices — about the leaders they want to represent them, where they want to live and work, where they want to send their children to school, where they should invest their money, how they should think about the world — without the best possible information.
 
Before proceeding further, I should make this clear:  I speak to you as an editorial writer, not as a reporter although I was a reporter for many years, mostly for Reuters, the international wire service.
 
For American journalists, this distinction between reporters and editorial writers is very important.
 
Reporters obviously have personal experiences and personal points of view that inform who they are and how they work. But as they go about their jobs interviewing people, examining documents and observing events to report and produce the best possible version of truth in any given story, they are supposed to leave their personal views out.
 
I, however, am paid to write opinion, and specifically the institutional opinion of The New York Times. Reporters don’t tell me and other members of the Editorial Board what opinions to express; I and my board colleagues don’t tell reporters what or how to report.
 
Although this is not well understood outside of the United States – indeed, even many Americans don’t realize it – our functions are separate. Reporters, in short, should not be blamed if a newspaper editorial criticizes a leader and his policies.
 
So what is life like for journalists in Donald Trump’s America?
 
As you may know, The New York Times editorial page opposed Mr. Trump’s election and has relentlessly criticized him during the campaign and since he took office.
 
He has no experience in government, seems singularly uninterested in the details of the complex, life-and-death issues that presidents have to grapple with daily, is openly disdainful of governmental institutions, has close advisers who advocate dissembling the system and seems uniquely ignorant of the United States Constitution and what it means to run the most powerful nation in the world.
 
Many people, myself included, were stunned when Mr. Trump won and it engendered a profound sense of foreboding. What do we do now – as a nation, as a newspaper, as journalists, as citizens?
 
For me, the answer crystallized in November when I attended the annual dinner for The Committee to Project Journalists, which promotes press freedoms and defends journalists against reprisals. The vast majority of the time, the group’s focus has rightly been on defending journalists overseas.
 
But 2016 was not like other years. Throughout the presidential campaign, Mr. Trump regularly excoriated and mocked journalists, fostering a hostile environment in which his supporters often joined in taunting and threatening the press corps at political events. So when the Committee to Protect Journalists held its annual dinner, it rightly shone a spotlight on the United States itself.
 
The blunt warnings from some of the country’s most celebrated journalists felt surreal given that America’s Founders enshrined free press and free speech in the First Amendment of the Constitution.
That amendment reads:
 
“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.”
 
 As a result of the Founders’ foresight, the United States has long served as the premier advocate for and embodiment of those sacred principles.
 
But as David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, told the dinner audience: “This year the threats to press freedom are quite close to home. It’s right here.”
 
Although CNN, among other organizations, has been justly criticized for giving Mr. Trump far too much leeway – and free air time — during the campaign, its president Jeff Zucker promised that “we will hold the new administration’s feet to the fire and they should respect that, even if they don’t welcome it.”
 
The highlight, though, was a speech by Christiane Amanpour, CNN’s chief international correspondent, who received an award for extraordinary achievement in the cause of press freedoms.
 
“I never thought in a million years that I would be standing up here after all the times I’ve participated in this ceremony appealing, really, for the freedom and safety of American journalists at home,” she said.
 
Like many of us, Ms. Amanpour decried the rise of fake news in the American presidential campaign, a culture that increasingly rejects facts and a media that twisted itself in knots trying to balance coverage between the candidates.
The answer to these threats was simple to articulate but harder to execute: fight back, not in a vengeful way, but by doing what we do – the best journalism possible — even better.
 
The biggest threat to a free press in my country right now is the lies, lies and repeated lies emanating from the president.
 
Sure, all politicians shade the truth, omit facts, even lie now and then. But Mr. Trump and his administration have made misrepresentation, obfuscation and lack of access a tool of governing.
 
His spokesman does the same thing from the White House podium. Veteran reporters agree no president in modern times has been more hostile to and contemptuous of the press.
 
It’s all part of a pattern in which Mr. Trump has worked to delegitimize the institutions that can challenge him and his agenda, including the courts, Congress, NATO and other international institutions like the United Nations and the World Bank.
 
Does that sound familiar? The tactics of authoritarian, illiberal, anti-democratic — whatever you call them – leaders are pretty much the same.
 
On his first full day in office, President Trump unleashed a stunningly bitter attack on the news media, falsely accusing journalists of both inventing a rift between him and intelligence agencies and deliberately understating the size of his inauguration crowd.
 
He has called journalists “among the most dishonest human beings on earth.” He has also called us “enemies of the people,” a term generally associated with despotic communist governments rather than democracies.
 
It’s not just liberals who are alarmed by this. Two professors at two universities in Utah – a conservative state that went for Trump over Clinton by 45 percent to 27 percent – recently wrote a paper that concluded:
 
 “The evidence is overwhelming that Trump is engaged in something more substantial and more troubling than his predecessors.”
 
RonNell Andersen Jones, a law professor at the University of Utah, and Lisa Grow Sun, associate professor of law at Brigham Young, added that because Mr. Trump “appears to be on the path toward eliminating important protections for the press, we think this issue absolutely demands careful public attention.”
 
Although Mr. Trump told Times journalists during an interview in December after the election that he considers our newspaper – his hometown newspaper – a “jewel,” he regularly denounces us as “failing” in his Twitter account and accuses us of publishing “fake news.”
 
Among the most absurd false statements was Mr. Trump’s claim that up to 1.5 million people had attended his inauguration. The truth was easily proved with photographs comparing his inauguration to that of President Barack Obama in 2008, which actually drew many more participants. But even though the 2 pictures that ran side by side for weeks on social media, Mr. Trump kept insisting on his preferred reality.
 
He has also falsely claimed that 3 million people voted illegally in the election.
 
In fact, the Washington Post Fact Checker, a team of crack reporters who research the truth or fiction of political statements, has found that in Mr. Trump’s first 87 days in office, he made 394 false or misleading claims.
 
The same group concluded that, during the campaign, Mr. Trump told more of the most extreme category of falsehoods— 59 in all — then all other Republicans (or Democrats) combined in the past three years.

The bottom line: Mr. Trump told far more and more egregious falsehoods than Mrs. Clinton, Fact Checker and other similar groups agreed.
 
Meanwhile, the Pulitzer Prize-winning website Politifact, on its Truth-o-Meter monitor, currently rates a staggering 70% of the President's statements as mostly false, false or "pants-on-fire"—which means there is no basis in fact at all.
 
Mr. Trump eventually conceded that the lie that effectively launched his campaign – that President Obama was not born in the United States – was wrong. But mostly, he just makes accusations and clings to them, or just moves on.
 
Remember, this is not just random person; it’s the United States president. And the fact that so many people, in America and elsewhere, now doubt his word is a serious matter, eroding American credibility.
 
What if he needed to lead the nation to imminent war against an enemy? How would he convince the American people, or America’s allies, that his analysis was sound and that they should make that sacrifice?
 
His penchant for untruths has already an impact — contributing to the wave of international skepticism that greeted his decision to bomb Syria recently in retaliation for a chemical weapons attack.
 
And polls show (Pew Research Center, 4/17/17) that the public gives low job ratings to the President and the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Paul Ryan, also a Republican. To be honest, the polls show Americans are pretty down on journalists as well.
 
Mr. Trump’s disdain for journalists is enabling, if not actually encouraging, similar behavior among his cabinet. Unlike all of his predecessors for the last 50 years, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has made it clear he does not believe that speaking publicly, much less answering questions from reporters, is an essential part of his job.
 
Mr. Tillerson suspended the State Department’s daily press briefings – the central vehicle for all administrations to explain their foreign policy — for six weeks. While the briefings have now been resumed, they are in a diminished form and there is no permanent department spokesman.
 
Mr. Tillerson initially refused to take journalists on his plane for overseas trips, then – after withering criticism from reporters and others — agreed to take two reporters per trip, far fewer than his predecessors. This makes it much harder to know what he is doing and why.
 
Another troubling perversion of the American free press results from what is now called “fake news.” That basically is content manipulated to seem like a news story from a reputable source when it is nothing but a lie. Alleged stories are then endlessly circulated on social media, doing incalculable damage.
 
During the 2016 campaign, many Internet sites appeared out of nowhere and pumped out pro-Trump hoaxes tying his opponent Hillary Clinton to Satanism, pedophilia and other conspiracies but were actually run by foreigners based overseas, The Times reported.
 
Some were the work of young, apolitical opportunists keen on making a profit. But other provocateurs were fans of Vladimir Putin and wanted to get Mr. Trump elected.
 
There have been no credible charges that the Russians manipulated the actual voting system and thus threw the election to Mr. Trump. But plenty of people believe Russian meddling created enough bad publicity and trouble for the Clinton campaign that Mr. Trump benefitted.
 
One example is the “fake news” story that Democrats wanted to impose sharia law in Florida. Another alleged “fake news” story had Hillary Clinton running a child sex ring out of a pizza shop in Northwest Washington, D.C., near where I used to live.
 

That second one just missed being a tragedy. The story prompted a North Carolina man to travel hundreds of miles to the popular restaurant to “self-investigate” the election-related conspiracy that spread on-line during Mrs. Clinton’s campaign. The man was arrested by local police after he walked into the restaurant carrying an assault rifle and fired one or more shots.
 
One of the more insidious effects of Mr. Trump’s behavior is the signal it sends to the rest of the world. American presidents and their top officials have long been champions of a free press and transparency. Not this time.
 
Seldom have professional journalists – real truth-seekers — been more important and more necessary. And many new reputable news platforms – such as Politico and Vox — have established themselves, especially on the Internet.
 
Yet we are also operating in an environment in which newspapers, which had been the bedrock of American journalism, are facing difficult financial conditions. Many newspapers, especially local newspapers, have gone out of business and those still publishing, including my own, are struggling to find a winning formula that will ensure their survival.

Like most news organizations, The New York Times is focusing increasingly on digital publishing, the future. Both newspaper subscriptions and digital subscriptions are up but there are still major questions about what will guarantee a stable financial base in the coming decades.
 
How has the media reacted?
 
The 2016 American presidential campaign inspired some serious soul-searching by editors and media executives. Did we spend too much time covering Hillary Clinton’s email controversy and not enough on Mr. Trump’s business holdings and his connections to Russia? In an effort to be fair, did we too often give a false equivalency to both candidates?
 
Now that Mr. Trump is in the White House we face this dilemma: How to cover a president who seems to have no respect for the truth and for his obligation to be straight with the American people?
 
It got to the point when The Times finally decided to use the word lie – rather than more euphemistic terms like falsehood or mistruth – to describe Mr. Trump’s lack of candor in a front-page story and in the headline.
 
It happened last September when Mr.Trump finally backed off his false claim about Mr. Obama not being born in the United States.
 
And it happened in January, after the inauguration, when Mr. Trump repeated an assertion – for which there was not a shred of truth — that millions of ballots cast illegally by undocumented immigrants cost him the popular vote. “Meeting With Top Lawmakers, Trump Repeats an Election Lie,” the newspaper reported.
 
Newspapers, The Times included, rarely describe a president in a news story as flat out lying and the decision was very controversial, prompting considerable public debate. But it was the right thing to do because it was the truth and because the force of a president relentlessly pedaling his own distorted reality had to be counter-acted.
 
Times editors have said they will be judicious in using the words lie and lying in the future, as they should. But clearly there are instances when only blunt terms will do.
 
In January, top editors of The New York Times issued a statement outlining a renewed commitment to report on the tectonic shifts to America and the global world order initiated by Mr. Trump’s election and promising to invest an extra $5 million in even more ambitious coverage.
 
The Washington Post has also expanded coverage. Meanwhile, Reuters’ urged its reporters to double-down on “reporting fairly and honestly, by doggedly gathering hard-to-get information – and by remaining impartial.
 
A special New York Times fund was started so that readers could contribute money to underwrite subscriptions for students who might not otherwise have access to paper. We want to foster a new generation of readers who care about what’s going on in their communities, country and the world and view us as a trusted news source.
 
Towards this end, I personally make it a point to teach journalism classes when I can and to host students and young professionals for discussions at the paper where we talk about what good journalism means and why it’s important in a democracy.
 
So how can the Americans and the American press push back against a Trump presidency?
 
— As I mentioned, news organizations have re-dedicated themselves to rigorous, path-breaking journalism. Reporters are working overtime ferreting out the conflicts of interest of Mr. Trump and his top appointees
 
— The Times, Washington Post, PolitiFact and other news organizations are being aggressive about fact-checking Mr. Trump and his policies. If he repeats a lie, we identify it and explain why it is completely untrue or partly untrue.
 
— We are also deeply concerned about the way Mr. Trump has turned the presidency into a family business – his daughter and son-in-law work in The White House as two of his closest advisers — and is leveraging his power to expand their corporate holdings worldwide. If he and his family seem to have violated ethics rules with their far-flung business empire, we write it.
 
— The New York Times has long been fastidious about correcting errors in our own copy – if we make a mistake we own up to it, even if a name is misspelled – and continue to do so. We don’t want Mr. Trump or other critics to have a basis for accusing us of misrepresenting the facts.
 
— For years now, the New York Times has had a public editor whose job is to analyze and criticize the newspaper’s own coverage. The woman who now holds the position is Liz Spayd and she reports only to the publisher. Many of her critiques, which run publicly in the paper and/or online, are not favorable to Times’ journalists and we all learn from them, even if we don’t necessarily agree or like them.
 
— In a broader civil society sense, citizens have organized, held meetings to which they invited their congressmen and senators and gave them an earful about the dangers of repealing Obamacare, the health care program enacted under President Obama.
 
They also deluged congressional offices with phone calls. At its best, representative democracy means citizens can have power when they mobilize and many Americans have demonstrated a new vigor for the non-violent mechanism of public protests.
 
— On April 15, the day Americans pay their income taxes, people marched in many cities demanding that Mr. Trump release his tax returns – a exercise in transparency that all previous presidents going back to Richard Nixon had done but with which Mr. Trump has refused to comply.
 
— It is especially significant that the American judiciary – a co-equal branch of government with Congress and the presidency – remains strong and vigorous. So far, it has been doing the job it needed to do to check Mr. Trump’s excesses and unwise impulses.
 
For instance, more than 50 lawsuits have been filed across the country to overturn his visa ban on people coming from mostly Muslim-majority countries.
In March, federal judges in Hawaii and Maryland blocked the ban from taking effect. The government is appealing those decisions, which have drawn Mr. Trump’s fury, and his administration has insisted it will prevail. But for the moment, at least, he cannot move forward.
 
— Humor has also been revived as an effective tool of resistance to Mr. Trump. Comedians and satirists are using jokes to poke fun at Mr. Trump and his administration and deflate their bombastic and fraudulent claims.
 
The Trump administration has breathed new life into Saturday Night Live, a weekly political comedy show, that uses its rapier wit to poke fun at the president and his staff. The TV comedian Stephen Colbert and Andy Borowitz of The New Yorker magazine are among other humorists who skewer Mr. Trump daily.
 
Mr. Trump is not happy about this, but there is not much that he can do.
 
President Erdogan’s Turkey
 
Mr. Trump’s drift towards authoritarianism poses a unique challenge because he is the supposed leader of the Western world.
 
Unfortunately, he is not the only example of a strongman who is determined to exert maximum control and who realizes that intimidating and regulating the media is a crucial tool of success. Think Putin in Russia, Xi in China even Orban in Hungary.
 
And then there is Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey, which for me may be the biggest disappointment of all.
 
When I began writing editorials for The New York Times in 2007, we were hopeful about the prospects for Turkey’s democracy. As late as March 2011, we wrote how “Turkey has long provided a heartening model of democracy for the Muslim world.”
 
We also commented that “Since Mr. Erdogan took office in 2003, he and his party have changed Turkish society for the better. They have shown that a party rooted in Islam can reinforce democracy by expanding religious freedom. And they have reasserted civilian control over a politicized military.”
 
In that same piece – and this was the main point – we also expressed concern about how “Turkey’s government is betraying its values and its citizens, pressuring journalists to mute critical reporting about Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his administration” by arresting the journalist Nedim Sener and waging out of control conspiracy investigations.
 
Since then it’s been downhill. As CPJ reported in December, at least 81 journalists are imprisoned in Turkey, all of them facing anti-state charges. They are among the 259 journalists in jail worldwide — the highest number recorded since 1990
 
Some of our most recent editorials have made these points:
 
— March 8: Mr. Erdogan’s Jaw-Dropping Hypocrisy
“Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has gall. He has jailed tens of thousands of people, shuttered more than 150 media companies and called a referendum in April to enlarge his powers. Yet when local authorities in Germany, for security reasons, barred two Turkish ministers from campaigning on his behalf among Turks living in Germany, Mr. Erdogan exploded, accusing Germany of Nazi practices and knowing nothing about democracy. If he himself was barred from speaking in the country, he warned, he’d “set the world on fire.”
 
“… Some furious German politicians have urged Chancellor Angela Merkel to tell Mr. Erdogan that he is not welcome in Germany. Properly, and wisely, she has not. Appearances by leading Turkish politicians, she said, “remain possible within the laws applicable here.”
 
“…The better response is to continuously remind Mr. Erdogan, his surrogates and his people that the freedoms so many Turks find in Germany are being systematically and shamelessly destroyed in Turkey.”
 
— March 29: Turkey’s Dangerous Path Away From Democracy
“Authoritarian leaders have long appreciated the power of fanning fears of real or perceived enemies to garner popular support. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey is good at this. He has exploited a conflict with Kurdish insurgents and a failed coup to win elections and wage a brutal crackdown on critics, and now he is picking a fight with Europe to rally support for a referendum next month on constitutional changes that would essentially give him unfettered power. The tactic might get him some votes, but like the powers he seeks, it has dangerous consequences for Turkey’s future.”
 
— April 17: Democracy Loses in Turkey
“The best thing that can be said about Turkey’s constitutional referendum is that many voters — 48.7 percent of those casting ballots — opposed President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s most outrageous move yet to solidify his autocratic rule. Mr. Erdogan, who had expected to win 60 percent of the vote on Sunday, lost the major cities of Ankara and Istanbul. His legitimacy was further eroded by allegations of voting irregularities from international monitors…
 
Although Turkey is a vital member of NATO, it is increasingly an outlier in the alliance, which was founded on democratic values…”
 
So, why does a newspaper in New York spend so much time writing about Turkey?
 
Despite some isolationist political currents in my country and in Europe, we take seriously the fact that we live in a globalized world and what happens in Turkey – and in endless other parts of the globe — can very often affect America in significant ways. Take the Syrian civil war and the fight against Islamic State, for instance.
 
We also take seriously that Turkey is an important country in the Middle East and a vital link to Europe.
 
Not incidentally, the United States and Turkey have been NATO allies since 1952 – Turkey has the alliance’s largest standing army — and our fates are bound by a commitment to a common defense, not just economic investment and where vacationers may find the best beach or historic landmark.
 
We believe we are stronger and more able to prosper and live in peace when democracies are healthy and robust, based not just elections but an interlocking web of values and institutions that ensure citizens have a voice in their governments, can live freely and the rights of the minority are protected.
 
That shared vision may be shattering. Not just because of Mr. Erdogan but also because of Mr. Trump. In a shocking development, the American president called the Turkish president to congratulate him on the recent constitutional referendum, despite the alleged voting irregularities and what we and many others saw as Mr. Erdogan’s authoritarian power-grab.
 
American journalists are not at risk in the same way that Turkish journalists are. Mr. Trump has not launched a wave of arrests nor moved to close media outlets or to have cronies take them over.
 
In general, major media organizations in the United States are strongly committed to their mission. They enjoy solid protections because of the Constitution and an independent judiciary.
 
But the perceived threats have so expanded under Mr. Trump that a coalition of advocacy organizations, including the Committee to Protect Journalists and the Freedom of Press Foundation, have just announced a new website to keep track of press freedom incidents in the United States.
 
Even as American journalists pay more attention to the stresses we face at home, I am confident my newspaper will continue to support the cause of democracy and a free press in Turkey.
 
Ultimately, though, if democracy is to revive in Turkey, it will do so because millions of Turks do not want the authoritarian system Mr. Erdogan has imposed and will find ways to reclaim their rights and freedoms, including a free press.