By The Herald Editorial Board
Earlier this summer when the Boston Globe coordinated a campaign that encouraged more than 400 newspapers to publish editorials promoting freedom of the press and criticizing President Trump’s frequent attacks on the media The Herald Editorial Board declined to participate.
We opted not to join the chorus not because we disagreed with the message from fellow journalists; instead, we believed it best to keep our voice independent and to express our criticisms of the Trump administration — as we have done in the past — when there was reason.
There is reason now.
News continues to roil over the certain murder of Washington Post columnist, U.S. resident and Saudi national Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey. Khashoggi, a frequent critic of the leadership of his own country, entered the consulate to file routine papers but did not leave alive.
In the midst of shifting explanations meant to distance Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman from the slaying — including the ludicrous claim that the 59-year-old reporter “died in a fistfight” with 15 Saudi nationals — it’s become clear that Khashoggi’s death was politically motivated. Even as Saudi Arabia has been celebrated for recent modest reforms — including allowing women to drive and movie theaters to open in the fundamentalist Islamic nation — it has also continued its repression of dissidents and those calling for greater civil freedoms.
Against that backdrop — and President Trump’s vacillating stances on who might be responsible for Khashoggi’s death and what sanction of Saudi Arabia he would find acceptable — Trump traveled late last week to Montana for a political rally for Republican congressional candidates.
Among the candidates is Rep. Greg Gianforte, a New Jersey transplant to the Big Sky state, who is running for re-election following his attack last year on a reporter for The Guardian.
Asked a question on health care by reporter Ben Jacobs, Gianforte, in an assault witnessed by other reporters and recorded on audio, grabbed Jacobs by the neck, slammed his body to the ground and punched him several times. Gianforte was found guilty of misdemeanor assault, sentenced to community service and anger management treatment and fined $300.
Gianforte won election to Congress last year to an unexpired term.
Gianforte has since apologized to Jacobs, but Trump — who has repeatedly painted members of the news media as “enemies of the people” and decried respected publications as “FAKE NEWS” — could not resist celebrating the assault of a reporter who asked a question of a candidate.
“I heard he body-slammed a reporter,” Trump said of Gianforte during the rally in Missoula.
“Anybody that can do a body-slam,” he added, “that’s my kind of guy.”
While many Republicans gave their standard tongue-clicking “well, what are you going to do?” response to Trump’s comments, the Guardian’s U.S. editor, John Mulholland, was clear as to the threat presented by the president’s attaboy for an assault against a journalist.
“To celebrate an attack on a journalist who was simply doing his job is an attack on the First Amendment by someone who has taken an oath to defend it,” Mulholland said in a statement. “In the aftermath of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, it runs the risk of inviting other assaults on journalists both here and across the world where they often face far greater threats.”
These are not hypothetical threats. The Committee to Protect Journalists reports that this year alone, 63 journalists have been killed worldwide. Another 262 journalists have been imprisoned across the globe, many in countries whose leaders have been praised by President Trump for being strong and decisive men.
That number includes seven journalists held by Saudi Arabia, five by Russia, 20 by Egypt, and 41 by China. And Turkey, which has eagerly pursued the allegations against Saudi Arabia’s leadership in Khashoggi’s death, is no stalwart of press freedoms. It now holds 73 journalists in prison.
By comparison, U.S. journalists’ complaints about T-shirts and bumper-stickers that mock them with words like “Fight for the Truth; Punch a Journalist” and “Rope. Tree. Journalist. Some assembly required” might seem silly. That is until one remembers the fatal shooting of five newspaper staffers at the Annapolis Capital Gazette in Maryland in June by a man who had long held a grudge against the newspaper.
Khashoggi, in a final commentary published by The Washington Post this weekend — and reprinted in The Herald — repeated a argument he had been making for years: the urgent need for greater press and speech freedoms in the Arab world to confront another “Iron Curtain” that smothers civil rights in those countries.
Khashoggi knew that only through speech and press freedoms would Arab societies have the best opportunity to gain awareness of the problems those nations face and that give the public the power they need to demand and secure change from their leaders.
“We need to provide a platform for Arab voices. We suffer from poverty, mismanagement and poor education. Through the creation of an independent international forum, isolated from the influence of nationalist governments spreading hate through propaganda, ordinary people in the Arab world would be able to address the structural problems their societies face,” he wrote.
Our society faces our own problems, fortunately for us to a far lesser degree than in the Arab world. But we are not immune from the influences that result from a lack of respect for First Amendment rights and for those who practice those rights and who now must stand up when a presidential administration casts journalists as “the enemy of the American people” and spreads “hate through propaganda.”
In protecting freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly and to petition for a redress of grievances, the First Amendment provides the oxygen the allows our democracy to breathe. We ask that our readers stand with us and protect those freedoms.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
