Lee Siegel

[Commentary] Seen through their own eyes, journalists in these times believe they are doing what they have always done, which is to uncover and report the truth. Seeing themselves through the eyes of their increasingly powerful and influential detractors in the White House, though, they are on edge: They must tread carefully so as not to make a mistake; they must triple, quadruple, quintuple check their facts against the facts; check their conclusions against their opinions; check their opinions at the door; suppress themselves on social media; avoid demonstrations and other public forums; show solidarity with other journalists; be quick to condemn the mistakes or errors of judgment of other journalists; be more intrepid than ever lest they allow this new regime to erode social and political norms; be more careful than ever lest they be exposed and disgraced by a “sting” operation; concede their profession’s shortcomings; defend their profession; be certain not to allow their defensiveness and injured pride to interfere with their jobs. Given this new mental atmosphere, all of the frightened tremors shooting through journalism now are not, to my mind, the result of an authentic fear that Trump will suspend the Constitution, declare martial law and, among other authoritarian acts, repress free speech and abolish the press. The fear of such events is really the displacement of a much deeper anxiety.

[Lee Siegel is the author of five books and the recipient of a National Magazine Award for Reviews and Criticism. ]

[Commentary] Not once in the eight years that George W. Bush was president did he handle the press with the derision and contempt President Donald Trump displayed in his first week. Instead, the media in the Bush era relied on access and sources to assimilate the most catastrophic lie in American history. Compared to President Bush and Vice President Cheney’s smooth, respectful manipulation and subjugation of the media, President Trump and his regime’s snarling hostility and barefaced lying to the press—ie, their openness about their motives—are a gift to the republic.

[Lee Siegel is the author of five books and the recipient of a National Magazine Award for Reviews and Criticism. ]

[Commentary] We, as journalists, had better take extra care these days to strike the right balance between reacting and overreacting if we don’t want to be used as pawns in someone else’s strategy. Sometimes it seems that all the press wants is for President-elect Donald Trump to agree not to set up concentration camps—even as he confers with Republican leaders on how to completely dismantle what’s left of America’s public spaces, public institutions, and protections for the poor and the vulnerable. We will have our civil liberties, but nothing else.

[Lee Siegel is the author of five books and the recipient of a National Magazine Award for Reviews and Criticism.]

[Commentary] Donald Trump is a moral, intellectual and spiritual failure. Trump’s followers forgive his abusiveness, callousness and mendacity because it embodies, to use Isaiah Berlin’s famous phrase, “the crooked timber of humanity.” His failures of character allow them to forgive him his wealth and power. What his followers cannot forgive is the liberal media’s smug enforcement of the straight and narrow path to happiness and success, a smugness and prescriptiveness often born in conditions of prosperity and privilege that are far removed from the way the majority of Americans exist.

Most American define success in terms of their families, their work—if they’re lucky enough to be working, and at a job with dignity—and their attachment to their communities. For most of the media, success is the right school, the right style of parenting, the right cultural products, the right job, the right etiquette in every social situation, the right social attitudes, and the right workout. That difference between how the media defines success and failure and how much of the rest of the country does, is one of the great causes of the divide between the press and the tens of millions of Americans who have rallied behind the exceptionally flawed Republican standard-bearer. It is a reason most of the media never grasped the rise of Trump’s base of support. Unless it’s addressed, one of the legacies of the 2016 election will be a permanent, and deepening, mistrust of and alienation from the mainstream press.

[Lee Siegel is the author of five books and the recipient of a National Magazine Award for Reviews and Criticism.]

[Commentary] In June 1954 on national television, Joe Welch, the US Army’s chief counsel, exposed Senator Joseph McCarthy’s dubious morality with those two legendary questions: “Have you no decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” Such was the novelty of television back then that having given Sen McCarthy an authoritative forum for his views, TV could now serve as the instrument of his destruction. We all know what followed. The media attained the highest point of its legitimacy and authority during the Vietnam War with the publication of the Pentagon Papers and then the unfolding of the Watergate scandal. That ascendancy ran parallel to the rapid discrediting of politics as a vocation. Journalists were heroes. Politicians were scoundrels.

Thirty years later, with the revelations of the media’s blindness to and sometimes complicity with the lies that led America into the Iraq War, journalists joined politicians in the space of detention into which public opinion puts those figures who betray the people’s trust. From that point on, America, once dubbed the oldest young country in the world by Gertrude Stein, began to experience the historical version of a senior moment. It began to undergo a Weimar moment.

[Lee Siegel is the author of five books and the recipient of a National Magazine Award for Reviews and Criticism. His forthcoming book, The Draw: A Memoir, will be published in April.]