Foreign Policy

[Commentary] President Donald Trump is right. There is an epidemic of “fake news” in America. Only it’s being perpetuated not by his political opponents but by him and his supporters. Trump is quickly undoing America’s traditional role as a champion of free speech and free press in the world. He sounds very much like an authoritarian, even if he lacks the power of one, and actual authoritarians are cheered by his words.

The New York Observer, owned by President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, was a friendly outlet for the 2016 Russian hackers. Kushner has long denied any collusion with the Russian government, which is suspected of targeting the 2016 election, but his newspaper proved a favored conduit for hacks, which the U.S. intelligence community says were carried out on Kremlin orders.

BuzzFeed has subpoenaed the Democratic National Committee for information related to the Democratic hack — its latest salvo in the media company’s efforts to defend itself against an ongoing libel suit connected to its publication of the infamous Steele dossier. The subpoena was served on the DNC on Nov 3. Aleksej Gubarev, a Russian technology executive, has sued BuzzFeed for libel for its decision to publish a series of memos authored by the former British spy Christopher Steele.

[Commentary] The message from America’s highest official — that the world’s most professional and trusted media outlets are malicious frauds, that facts and fakeries are equivalent, and that press access to policymaking and diplomacy must submit to the whims of the powerful — represent a set of values that could undermine democracy. As every parent, corporate CEO, and Fox News staffer knows, values are set at the top.

Regardless of how he treats reporters behind closed doors, President Donald Trump has signaled publicly that it’s okay to play nasty with the press. The relationship between the media and the state is an uneasy truce; Trump has offered public officials license to rewrite the terms as they see fit.

[Suzanne Nossel is executive director of the Pen American Center]

It was a bad week for the reports on freedom of the media in Russia.

• Reporters Without Borders released its 2017 world press freedom index. Russia came in at 148, after such bastions of independent media as South Sudan and Thailand.
• A Ukrainian human rights delegation briefed the Helsinki Commission on the case of Oleg Sentsov — a Ukrainian filmmaker imprisoned in a Siberian penal colony for his opposition to the annexation of Crimea — and abuses of Ukrainian journalists and creative professionals more broadly.
• Freedom House unveiled its Freedom of the Press 2017 report. That report gives Russia partial credit for the world’s 13-year low in press freedom.

“Vladimir Putin’s regime in Russia has been a trailblazer in globalizing state propaganda. It continues to leverage pro-Kremlin reporting around the world,” the report states. The three taken in tandem tell a story — one in which violence against journalists in Russia and the region is connected to violence against journalism around the world.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence April 19 published a document advocating for the protection of what newly minted spy chief Dan Coats has described as the “crown jewels” of the intelligence community. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act, in particular Section 702, authorizes the bulk of the intelligence community’s overseas digital collection powers. A new informational questionnaire published by the ODNI, says maintaining those surveillance powers is “the intelligence community’s top legislative priority for 2017.” If Congress didn’t reauthorize those authorities, it would “greatly impair the ability of the United States to respond to national security threats,” the document notes.

[Commentary] In short, President Donald Trump is very likely a short-timer whose moment on our national stage — even if it lasts four years — will not have warranted the degree to which it has shifted our attention from the important long-term issues that do not go away simply because we stop paying attention to them or, as in the case of climate change or Russian wrongdoing, our president continues to pretend they don’t exist. President Trump will not inadvertently or otherwise damage the fundamentals of what makes America great. Indeed, recent events have restored hope that perhaps his story may one day be seen as proof that the American system works and that bad actors are ultimately brought down.

But we need to tear our eyes away from the spectacle of this clusterf--k of a presidency and its daily dramas and periodically look up and out to our horizons, recognizing that the narcissism aside, there remains real greatness in America that needs tending, planning, and nurturing in the context of the real world — even if, at the moment, there is very little evidence of that greatness at the center of our government.

Americans now find themselves in day four of a real-world experiment: What happens when an elected official with an authoritarian bent and a long-nurtured hatred of media criticism collides with a free press backed by strong democratic institutions?

I have spent years covering the media landscape in China, an illiberal one-party state with notorious and worsening censorship. In White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s hostile remarks, I immediately recognized what I have come to know very well — an explicit government demand for media censorship. I was far from alone in my alarm. The New York Times reported that the “news media world found itself in a state of shock” after the day’s remarks. Social media teemed with jokes at Spicer’s expense, juxtaposing his photo with outlandish claims like “the world is flat.” To some degree, clashing with the press is par for the course for governments and leaders around the world. But the authoritarian government in Beijing has shown how to delegitimize those outlets it doesn’t control, by presenting them as biased, unreliable, or unfair.

[Commentary] It’s often the little things that lead up to the big moments. At present, there’s legislation that’s about to head to President Barack Obama for signature that qualifies as one of those moments. Embedded in the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) is language aimed at streamlining the bureaucracy of the United States’ government-funded international media outlets. The proposed fix, the result of a hodgepodge compromise between the Hill, the White House, and some Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) officials, is to replace the part-time BBG with a full-time CEO who would have full authority to run the show.

The simplicity and likely efficiency of the new arrangement fits the pro-business zeitgeist of the new administration — except for one thing. The key to the success of US broadcasting has always been its professional reporting in alignment with democratic values. So, here’s a message to the president-elect: If it’s a bargain, if the brand is strong, and if it’s not broken, don’t fix it. Our adversaries’ half-truths may sometimes look successful, but that does not mean we want to emulate them. American foreign broadcasting must continue to reflect the American values of free speech, openness to criticism, and tolerance of divergent opinions. That is why our democratic system is better, and in the long run, that is why it will win.

[Jeffrey Gedmin is a senior fellow at Georgetown University and a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. He was president of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty from 2007 to 2011.]