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Since the time of the Roman Empire, the fourth estate has been celebrated as a pillar of democracy, a guardian of the separation of powers and a systemic counterbalance of the natural propensity of power to corrupt.
But in a challenge to the American system of checks and balances, it has become a recurrent theme of the daily news cycle for President Trump and his allies to marshal their base under the banner of "Fake News" and to accuse journalists of being "enemies of the people," a phrase with grim historical roots dating to Joseph Stalin and The Terror of the Jacobin dictatorship of the 1700s.
All presidents spar with the press. Richard Nixon pioneered the depiction of the media as liberal bogeymen, "nattering nabobs of negativism" in immortal phrase of William Safire, an administration speech writer who later became famous as a New York Times columnist. But a president schooled in the ways of entertainment sleight-of-hand has mutated what was an accepted parlor trick to rally conservatives into a full-blown assault on the American press.
The administration has stopped holding regular press briefings and when it does pass out information, it frequently lies; Trump himself has been documented telling more than 10,000 lies, reporters now do their jobs in an unprecedented climate of intimidation and fear. Many are bullied or harassed — online or in real life. And in Annapolis, a man with a gun walked into a newsroom and slaughtered five staffers.
In response, the Main Stream Media has galvanized a range of norm shattering strategies as the spearhead of civil society. Once defined by its fierce independence, the press has banded together in collective solidarity, publishing mass editorials. Breaking with tradition, it has done away with diplomatic double speak in calling out mendacity and tries to confront falsehoods with an army of fact-checkers charged with defending delegitimized facts.
Jim Acosta, one of President Trump's chief whipping boys in his war against the press, is joining MSNBC's Stephanie Ruhle to discuss the trials, tribulations and constitutional imperatives of covering The White House as a headliner of the October 27 Conversations On the Green, "Working Without A Net: On Air In The Age Of Trump."
