Commentary

JOHN BRUMMETT: Friends and enemies

Editor's note: This is an updated and revised version of a column first published online-only Wednesday.

With the preposterous second-place president calling the New York Times fake news and the enemy of the American people, I opened Monday's online edition of that publication to behold the fraud and treason.

"Pence tells a wary European Union that it has Trump's support," blared a front-page Times headline.

Apparently, Vice President Mike Pence did not tell the European Union any such thing, or maybe the EU is not wary. Or both.

"Merrick Garland has reached acceptance about nomination," declared another of the paper's large headlines.

Apparently, former President Barack Obama's nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court, who never got so much as a courtesy from the Republican Senate, has not reached acceptance about that, and remains as irritated as ever.

"Millions in South Sudan need food, UN says," according to another headline.

Apparently, either the South Sudanese are well-nourished or the United Nations did not really say the obvious that they aren't.

Why, oh, why, would a newspaper defraud us that way? What kind of perversity is it that purposely infuses the American people with misinformation about what the vice president said and whether Merrick Garland is content?

The preposterous second-place president has answered that question: It's because the newspaper in question is the enemy of the American people, engaging in such vile and sinister conspiracies as to leave us hopelessly at sea about ... everything.

You're saying I should get serious. All right. Gladly.

Here was the biggest headline on the front online page of the Monday edition of the New York Times: "Trump allies quietly push plan for Russia and Ukraine."

The article reported that, before Mike Flynn resigned as national security adviser, two business associates of President Donald Trump, along with a Ukrainian lawmaker tied to former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, delivered to Flynn's office a written plan to settle matters between Ukraine and Russia and permit the lifting of American sanctions on Russia.

It represented the precise kind of thing the preposterous second-place president calls fake news.

That's because the reported plan amounted merely to an outside group's working paper in a long process, and did not represent the president's position--yet, anyway.

Its publication was inconvenient to the president. It associated the White House with activity that was not part of any designed and positive communications strategy.

It was good newspaper reporting, in other words--a scoop, one that advised discerning readers of a development helpful to them in considering controversies about their new administration and Russia.

An article like that can sound an alarm on a looming possibility. It can force the White House to account for, credibly deny, or abandon the actions it is said to be contemplating.

The article thus served the American people not as their enemy, but their friend, by putting them in the loop where the preposterous second-place president did not want them.

Newspaper lore refers to nagging those in power as "afflicting the comfortable," which is the case here, at least to the extent that this preposterous second-place president's narcissistic personality disorder permits him comfort.

At worst, the article was overplayed. I'd say it probably was.

This is the same kind of treatment that drove Hillary and Bill Clinton to railing profanely against the New York Times.

You see, it was the Times--an editorially liberal newspaper that is generally even-handed and ground-plowing in its news pages--that first broke and then sustained the drumbeat of articles about the Clintons' failed land deal in Arkansas called Whitewater.

The articles were overplayed, indeed unfair, but the Clintons did not allege them to be the work of enemies of the American people. They merely let their resentments simmer and trudged on, which is what we pay presidents to do.

The news coverage is the same as always, as good as ever, at times as misplayed or overplayed as ever. The difference is the precipitous decline in the quality of our president.

In that regard, a group calling itself Indivisible Central Arkansas will hold a town hall at 3 p.m. Sunday at St. Michael's Episcopal on Cantrell. It has invited me to speak briefly in defense of the news media against presidential attacks.

I am gratified that fellow citizens are motivated politically. I am thrilled folks are interested in hearing from a newspaper guy about the value of the news media.

I will seek to explain what good newspapers do, and the value of that, and assert that the more any president--Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump--is whining, even with occasional justification, the healthier our society.

Louis XIV said he was the state. Donald Trump most certainly is not, though he apparently thinks in his megalomania, vainglory and grandiloquence that he is.

A newspaper consistently pleasing him with its coverage is most likely a newspaper not of much service to its readers.

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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial on 02/23/2017

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