Forget what Time Magazine says about its 2018 Person of the Year. In 2018 it was Trump again, a fact that was affirmed by none other than Time Magazine's executive editor, Ben Goldberger.
The designation wasn't intended as a specific message to the magazine's runner-up choice, President Donald Trump, who has denounced "fake news" and called some reporters enemies of the people, said Ben Goldberger, executive editor.
It wasn't intended as a specific message? Pardon my skepticism. Let me stop here and state up front, journalism can be a dangerous, life threatening, life ending occupation. With rare exceptions, the awards journalists get are well deserved. At the same time, it's no good pretending that there have not been those exceptions. The New York Times proudly displays a Pulitzer Prize won in the 1930s by Walter Duranty for a series of articles extolling the wonders of a supposed Soviet workers paradise. In reality millions were dying of starvation in the Ukraine from Stalin's collectivism induced famine. Duranty and the Times knew it and ignored it, publishing a work of fiction glorifying the benefits of communism instead.
But back to 2018, why is this the Year of the Journalist, and not any of the preceding eight years? Because Trump. When the Obama Justice Department was caught spying on Fox News and Associated Press reporters, did Time Magazine champion their cause with Person of the Year honors? No. Nor did Time Magazine indicate any concerns about very real threats to journalism posed by Obama administration cyber attacks against Sharyl Attkisson, a reporter for CBS at the time.
Time's award, it seemed, was triggered by the death of Jamal Kashoggi whose horrific murder was ordered by someone high up in the Saudi government. But Kashoggi's murder did not signal a rise in political targeting of journalists. According to The Committee to Protect Journalists, the number of journalists confirmed to have been targeted in 2015 was 73 compared to 53 in 2018. In fact over the eight years of Obama's presidency, on average there were 10 more journalists confirmed to have been killed each year than in 2018. Where were the honors then?
In 2018 journalists get the honors because Trump has been calling out the press for its frequently biased, misleading, and dishonest reporting.
Time said that 2018 has been marked by manipulation and abuse of information, along with efforts by governments to foment mistrust of the facts.
Trump makes everybody crazy. And it's not just the liberal media that are suffering nervous breakdowns. Trump is a nightmare for the left. Liberal pundits have wet dreams of impeachment. Here's Robert Reich with a left wing confection of and wild, unrealistic imaginings.
Where would we be if a president could simply shut down the government when he doesn’t get his way? If he could stop federal prosecutions he doesn’t like and order those he wants? If he could whip up public anger against court decisions he disapproves of? If he could mobilize the military to support him, against Congress and the judiciary?
NeverTrump conservatives like Jonah Goldberg are having fits too. I don't know what Goldberg's problem is, but he just doesn't seem to get Trump. I don't know whether Goldberg really doesn't understand, or he's in denial.
Nearly all of the controversies that have bedeviled Trump’s administration are the direct result of his character, not his ideology. To be sure, ideology plays a role, amplifying both the intensity of anger from his left-wing critics and the intensity of his transactional defenders. Many of the liberal critics shrieking about the betrayal of the Kurds implicit in Trump’s decision to withdraw from Syria would be applauding if a President Clinton had made the same decision. And many of the conservatives celebrating the move would be condemning it.
But Trump’s refusal to listen to advisers; his inability to bite his tongue; his demonization and belittling of senators who vote for his agenda but refuse to keep quiet when he does or says things they disagree with; his rants against the First Amendment; his praise for dictators and insults for allies; his need to create new controversies to eclipse old ones; and his inexhaustible capacity to lie and fabricate history: All of this springs from his character.
Goldberg tries to peddle the notion that Trump is anti-democratic when he hits back at his enemies. Trump routinely calls out members of the media for inaccurate, misleading, or downright dishonest reporting. When he does that, Goldberg tries to sell it as an attack on the First Amendment. In doing so Goldberg is actually using a technique he describes in a book he wrote called The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas. Here is an example that he provides in the book's product description:
"One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter: Sure, if the other man is an idiot. Was Martin Luther King Jr. a terrorist? Was Bin Laden a freedom fighter?"
Calling Osama bin Laden a "freedom fighter" is not very different from saying that Trump "rants against the First Amendment" when he is really calling out Goldberg's fellow journalists for using the very technique that Goldberg complained about in his book. But the book was published in 2013, which has left Goldberg with five or six years to revise his thinking on the subject. Sadly for Goldberg, Trump supporters know the difference between Goldberg and reality. Complaints about biased or dishonest news reporting are not complaints about the First Amendment, no matter how badly Goldberg wants to make Trump out to be a fascist.
Looking back over the year, it's pretty obvious that Trump has been playing Goldberg and the rest of the liberal media "like a banjo at an Ozark hoedown," to quote Marvin Boggs in the movie Red 2. Creating new controversies is Trump's way of focusing the media on subjects they'd rather not cover. Recall when newly elected Trump tweeted about Obama wiretapping his campaign. "Without any evidence!" screeched the media in response. Fast forward: Is there anyone, anywhere who doesn't know that the Obama intelligence community had the Trump campaign under surveillance? And, that such surveillance was unethical at best and most likely illegal.
Tweets will not go away. Trump's tweets are obnoxious and annoying to Goldberg and the liberal media because they provide a platform that they can't filter. Trump, the real Person of 2018, has controlled the news cycles from wire to wire, and in so doing he's forced the Democrats to oppose positions they once claimed to favor, and to fight for positions they once pretended to be against. Democrats were always opposed to border security, but they always pretended to support it. Trump is forcing the Democrats to be more truthful, and they don't like it. Democrats want the flexibility to pretend they stand for whatever will help them at the moment, but Trump is tearing down the facade, ripping off the mask.
Expect the same in 2019. Break out the popcorn, the border wall fight is about to begin in earnest. Don't count on Trump losing it.
Last updated: January 2, 2019
