Enemy of the People: Trump's War on the Press, the New McCarthyism, and the Threat to American Democracy

by Marvin Kalb

Overview

"“The FAKE NEWS media is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!”

President Trump tweeted this declaration less than a month after his inauguration. Attacks on the media have been a hallmark of his presidential campaign and style of governance. This represents a dangerous and dramatic turning point. Twentieth-century dictators—Stalin, Hitler, and Mao—all denounced their critics, especially the press, as “enemies of the people.” Their goal was to delegitimize the work of the press—effectively calling it “fake news,” thereby creating confusion in the public’s mind about what’s real and what isn’t, what can be trusted and what can’t be.

This also appears to be Trump’s goal. In Enemy of the People, Marvin Kalb, an award-winning American journalist, writes with passion about his concerns for the future of American democracy. Can it withstand Trump’s unrelenting attacks on the press?

As Kalb shows, the press has been a bulwark of American democracy. He writes about Edward R. Murrow’s courageous broadcasts that turned the cold light of reality on Senator Joseph McCarthy’s “Red Scare” threats in the early 1950s. He also vividly reminds us of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s reporting during the Watergate scandal, which led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation.

Without a fearless, robust press, democracy is in peril. Kalb’s book is an eye-opening indictment of President Trump’s eff orts to debase and dehumanize the American media—and put the future of America’s democracy in question.

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Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780815735304
Publisher:	Brookings Institution Press
Publication date:	09/25/2018
Pages:	200
Product dimensions:	5.54(w) x 8.06(h) x 0.75(d)

About the Author

Marvin Kalb is senior adviser to the Pulitzer Center, a nonresident senior fellow at Brookings, Murrow Professor emeritus at Harvard, and former network correspondent at CBS and NBC News. He is the author, most recently, of The Year I Was Peter the Great: 1956—Khrushchev, Stalin’s Ghost, and a Young American in Russia and Imperial Gamble: Putin, Ukraine, and the New Cold War.

Table of Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments

Preface

1. Crossing a Flashing Red Line

2. From Nero to Trump

3. “The Appalling Becomes Excusable”

4. The Comparison Is Unmistakable

5. “He Had a Certain Raw Wit and Charm”

6. Ike vs. McCarthy

7. Senator, Meet Edward R. Murrow

8. From the War in Europe to the War in America

9. “Otherwise, It Is Not America”

10. A Free Press, Now More Than Ever

Notes

Index

Editorial Reviews

Kalb has written this book as something of a journalists’ call to arms, reminding them that determined reporters can and do make a difference in rooting out and spotlighting corruption, and in holding our leaders accountable to the people they represent.—Jennifer Bort Yacovissi, Washington Independent Review of Books

“To Trump, the journalists, judges and bureaucrats who try to hold him accountable and preserve democratic norms are “fake news” and “the deep state.” To Kalb, they are heroes. Reading this book may stiffen their resolve.”—Matthew Pressman, The Washington Post

From the Publisher

2018-11-07

The press is the enemy of the people? No, writes veteran journalist Kalb (Imperial Gamble: Putin, Ukraine, and the New Cold War, 2015, etc.): That's just another presidential projection.

In a sense, the free press is its own defense as a guarantor of a free society. But only in a sense, and it has frequently come under attack, especially under the administrations of Richard Nixon and now Donald Trump. Of the latter, the author, now associated with the Brookings Institution, confesses to not having taken him seriously, adding, "and when I did, finally, it was too late." Trump constantly attacks the press as the ocean attacks the beach, gnawing away at it so when journalists present evidence of his bad behavior, he can brush it away. Ironically, as Kalb notes, an early master of this strategy was Democratic advance man Pat Caddell, who worked for Jimmy Carter before going over to the Breitbart side of the force and pushing the thesis that the press was an instrument of the elite—and worse yet, "the network anchors and newspaper columnists themselves had become part of the elite, and they had to be made the target of an angry, outlier candidate." Enter Trump. While not necessarily sanguine about the chances, Kalb looks closely at the clash of visions between Joseph McCarthy and Dwight Eisenhower more than 60 years ago, with the hopeful thought that some like force might help temper Trump. However, he notes, McCarthy "was the most popular Republican in the country" after Ike himself. McCarthy connects to Roy Cohn, and Cohn to Trump, who learned his lessons well: Never admit error, and never apologize. While there's a little too much appeal here to the ghost of Edward R. Murrow and perhaps not enough practical resistance, the author rightly points out how the media brought some of the trouble on themselves by allowing Trump all the oxygen in the room—which can be fixed.

In this brief yet vigorous broadside, Kalb concludes that the media must shoulder the burden of checking the authoritarian impulse at work today: "There is no other option."

Kirkus Reviews