*Outside the Reuters news service building in Manhattan*

*Newspapers "gone to the Web" in California*
*— Photo by* *SusanLesch*

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

In the 1990s, someone wrote in The Weekly Standard — it may well have been Matt Labash — that for conservatives to triumph, all they had to do was to attack the messenger rather than the message. His advice was to go after the media, not the news.

Attacking the messenger was all well and good for the neoconservatives, but their less-thoughtful successors, MAGA supporters, are killing the messenger.

The news media— always identified as the “liberal media” (although much of the news media are right wing) — are now often seen, due to relentless denigration, as a force for evil, a malicious contestant on the other side.

No matter that there is no liberal media beyond what has been fabricated from political ectoplasm. Traditionally, most news proprietors have been conservative and many, but not most reporters, have been liberal.

It surprises people to learn that when you work in a large newsroom, you don’t know the political opinions of most of your colleagues. I have worked in many newsrooms over the decades and tended to know more about my colleagues’ love lives than their voting preferences.

This philosophy of “kill the messenger” might work briefly but down the road, the problem is no messenger, no news, no facts. The next stop is anarchy and chaos — you might say, politics circa 2024.

Add to that social media and their capacity to spread innuendo, half-truth, fabrication and common ignorance.

There is someone who writes to me almost weekly about the failures of the media — and I assume, ergo, my failure — and he won’t be mollified. To him, that irregular army of individuals who make a living reporting are members of a pernicious cult. To him, there is a shadow world of the media.

I have stopped remonstrating with him on that point. On other issues, he is lucid and has views worth knowing on such subjects as the Middle East and Ukraine.

That poses the question: How come he knows about these things? The answer, of course, is that he reads about them, saw/heard the news on television or heard it on radio.

Reporters in Gaza and Ukraine risk their lives, and sometimes lose them, to tell the world what is going on in these and other very dangerous places. No one accuses them of being left or right of center.

But send the same journalists to cover the White House, and they are assumed to be unreliable propagandists, devoid of judgment, integrity or common decency, so enslaved to liberalism that they will twist everything to suit a propaganda purpose.

That thought is on display every time Rep. Elise Stefanik (R.-N.Y.), an avid Trumper, is interviewed on TV. Stefanik attacks the interviewer and the institution. Her aim is to silence the messenger and leave the impression that she isn’t to be trifled with by the media, shades of Margaret Thatcher. But I interviewed “The Iron Lady,” and I can say she answered questions, hostile or otherwise.

Stefanik’s recent grandstanding on TV hid her flip-flop on the events on Jan. 6, 2021, and failed to tell us what she would do if she were to win the high office she clearly covets.

I have been too long in the journalist’s trade to pretend that we are all heroes, all out to get the truth. But I have observed that taken together, journalists tell the story pretty well, to the best of their own varied abilities.

We make mistakes. We live in terror of that. An individual here and there may fabricate — as Boris Johnson, a former British prime minister, did when he was a correspondent in Brussels. Some may, indeed, have political agendas; the reader or listener will soon twig that.

The political turmoil we are going through is partly the result of media denigration. People believe what they want to believe; they can seize any spurious supposition and hold it close as a revealed truth.

You can, for example, believe that ending natural-gas development in the United States will lead to carbon reduction worldwide, or you can believe that the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection with loss of life and the trashing of the nation’s great Capitol Building was an act of free speech.

One of the more dangerous ideas dancing around is that social media and citizen journalists can replace professional journalists. No, no, a thousand times no! We need the press with the resources to hire excellent journalists to cover local and national news, and to send, or station, staff around the world.

Have you seen anyone covering the news from Ukraine or Gaza on social media? There is commentary and more commentary on social media sites, all based on the reporting of those in danger and on the spot.

This is a trade of imperfect operators, but it is an essential one. For better or for worse, we are the messengers.

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com, and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

whchronicle.com

*The Hartford Courant, which began as a weekly called the Connecticut Courant on Oct. 29, 1764, and become a daily in 1837, is considered the oldest continuously published newspaper in America.*

VERNON, Conn.

If we can but prevent the government from wasting the labours of the people, under the pretense of taking care of them, they must become happy."

-- Thomas Jefferson to political philosopher Thomas Cooper, Nov. 29, 1802.

How much time should Connecticut politicians spend consulting Twitter and other like venues?

It depends how much time they have to waste. Positive comments are self-affirming, negative comments put a dent in swelling egos. Such sites are not a reliable guide to the majority temperaments of voters.

Do Washington, D.C., political-advisory groups offer winning advice to state non-incumbent politicians?

That has not been the case in Connecticut in the recent past. We all know that the second thing that happens after a non-unionized company becomes unionized is that “going out of business sales” are posted. The second thing that happens after a non-incumbent in Connecticut ties his or her political ascent to a Washington, D.C., campaign-advisory group is that the politician loses the race. State politics really is local. And politicians easily lose themselves in the gap that forms when they adopt unthinkingly a program hatched by underwriters detached from state issues. However, the financing of state campaigns is sometimes national. So, Washington contacts may be both financially necessary and politically lethal.

Is straddling the fence on “cultural issues” in Connecticut useful or not?

It is not useful. There is a problem with the nomenclature. Any issue not strictly economic is cultural. And there are very few economic issues that have no cultural ramifications. Inflation, for instance, is both an economic and a cultural issue, because excessive spending, excessive borrowing, and the devaluation of the currency through excessive printing of money causes cultural upheaval.

Straddling the fence on any issue, cultural or economic, does not generally achieve a positive purpose, because the straddler must engage in some form of dissimulation to garner the votes of both those who support A and not-A.

Now, political compromise is not the same sort of thing as embracing ends that exclude each other. You cannot both jump into the pool and not jump into the pool. But you may fashion an arrangement between swimmers and non-swimmers that may benefit both parties — for example by regulating the time during which the pool may be used. Gun regulation and abortion regulation are instances of this kind.

How much influence have Connecticut news media had in shaping the destiny of the state?

That depends on uniformity of purpose. A state’s media should be intellectually diverse enough to accommodate rival political viewpoints and, ideally, state media that have not simply surrendered to the status quo should be contrarian. This is what William Randolph Hearst meant when he said a newspaper “should have no friends.”

Politics is too important a business to leave entirely in the hands of incumbent politicians. When a state’s media offer political views that do not differ markedly from those officiating in what we might call a nearly permanent one-party state, it is fair to say that the nature of the state is what it is because the nature of journalism is what it is.

We are living when it has become exceedingly dangerous to let the reigning power think for us. As an institution, the media, which have changed a good deal over the years, have in the past been a sector whose members have jealously guarded their indispensable mandate – to think fearlessly, to say the thing that is, without fear or favor.

That is what a free press really means. Thomas Jefferson, the archangel of First Amendment freedoms, called our attention to the importance of a free press when he said that constitutional government in a republic, once destroyed by politicians, could be recovered and restored, provided that the press remained free.

In a letter to Edward Carrington in 1787, Jefferson wrote, “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them.”

Jefferson served as president from March 4, 1801, to March 4, 1809. The Jefferson/John Adams campaign, in 1800, was especially bruising. Yet we find Jefferson writing to the Marquis de Lafayette in 1823, “The only security of all, is in a free press. The force of public opinion cannot be resisted, when permitted freely to be expressed. The agitation it produces must be submitted to. It is necessary to keep the waters pure.” The turbulence aroused by a free press, Jefferson stressed, is “as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical… a medicine necessary for the sound health of government.”

Everyday upon awakening, reporters should ask themselves, “What turbulence have I caused today? Are we still free?”