The Revolution on Television

What it means to have a free press.

If you don’t work in the news media, you might not know that the press is referred to as The Fourth Estate. The term is attributed to Edmund Burke, an Anglo-Irish member of the British parliament, in 1787. He might have been implicitly referencing the three estates of Parliament at a time when debates first became open to the press—the press became the fourth estate when it gained the power to report on government deliberations. In France, the fourth estate sits just outside of the traditional three estates—the nobility, the clergy, and commoners. In the United States, the press serves as a fourth to the three co-equal branches of government—the legislative, the judicial, and the executive branches.

In whatever context, though, the idea is that the press is a fundamental pillar of society, sitting alongside state institutions but firmly outside of them. It is also an idea born of revolution: If Burke did coin the term, then he did so right after the United States broke free from Great Britain and was trying to form a new democracy, and right before the fall of the Ancien Regime. The press serves as a proxy for the public, and a check on institutional power. Every revolution has been fueled by an active press publishing ideas people in power would rather have repressed. Publishing is the bridge between the right to free speech and the ability to be heard. The founders of the United States thought it such a key freedom that it was the subject of the First Amendment to the Constitution. Every international watchdog measures the democracy of a country in part by assessing its press freedoms, which are so often tied to the other freedoms enumerated in the First Amendment, the right to assembly, and the rights to seek redress from the government.

I’ve been thinking about those rights lately both because they’re under attack in the brutal response against protestors, and because of The Bad Op-Ed.

If you watch only Fox News and spend all day on Facebook, like many in my county do, you would think that New York City, and other big cities, had been completely destroyed by looting and riots. In reality, there have been massive, largely peaceful protests with limited problems, sometimes driven either by professional thieves or right-wing provocateurs. In response, many cities, states, and President Donald Trump have used a few incidents of looting and property damage to violently break up the crowds. In some cities, police violence has been used to enforce curfews that are very likely unconstitutional anyway. The crowds, it must be remembered, came to protest police violence—most recently the murder of George Floyd—in the first place.

The violence was most egregiously and famously used by Trump himself to clear a path through Lafayette Square for his pathetic, cowardly little tin-pot dictator photo-op, but you can find examples of outrageous police brutality here and here and here and these cops have already been fired. Much of it has been directed at journalists. In addition to publishing and broadcasting, journalists also serve as professional witnesses. That’s what police are going after when they attack them.

In the midst of this clear government overreach, editors at The New York Times decided to publish, uncritically, an op-ed from the Senator from my own state, Tom Cotton. Cotton argued that the United States Military had to be called in to act against civilians in “an overwhelming show of force to disperse, detain and ultimately deter lawbreakers.” (I won’t link to it.) To justify this, he used the Fox News type of cherry-picked data points to try to say civil society is in danger. But in reality, he is arguing for the government to suppress free speech.

Cotton is arguably one of 100 of the most powerful people in the country. He can speak directly to the president, and his thoughts on how to use state power can become action. He doesn’t need the Times to broadcast his ideas. He has a megaphone by virtue of being elected. Early on, the Times’s defenders said free speech is about debating all ideas, but Cotton himself wanted to suppress ideas, and to suppress assembly.

It’s also worth wondering who he was speaking to, exactly. Arkansas has had protests, even in smaller towns, but none on the scale of larger cities. Many have been prayer vigils instead of “protests,” and there hasn’t been much civil disobedience. On Wednesday, the police department in Conway, a college town about an hour from here, posted the following on Facebook:

People praised it as a sign of unity, peace, and a sort of adultness. But I found it quietly menacing. There’s an implicit threat here: follow these rules. Another way to say that is: “Know your place.” There’s a kind of privilege and freedom inherent in civil disobedience, and I wonder if protestors in Arkansas do not have it. When one sees this images of trucks revving their engines from the sidelines, and waving Confederate battle flags, it’s hard not to feel the protestors are in even more danger than they might be elsewhere. I realized that I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a real protest of any kind in my town. There aren’t any now. And yet, members of my community keep taking to Facebook, terrified of a protest here. Many keep asking if “they” are coming. I weighed in at first. I said that if people in this community planned a protest, then there would be a protest. It took me a ridiculously long time to realize who they meant by “they.” The counsel on Facebook was to get your guns and baseball bats and prepare for violence. That is the audience Cotton was speaking to—the people who imagine a military crackdown is necessary against other people in far away cities they think are acting like an unruly mob. The voters who would face the crackdown would not be able to hold Cotton accountable for his views or his action.

Masha Gessen, who has been a voice of reason and sanity as we slide toward authoritarianism—(she’s seen it before)—wrote, in October, that she often asks the students in her college classes, “What is the First Amendment for?” They struggle to answer. Obviously, it guarantees freedom of the press, freedom of religion, freedom of expression. Freedom to dissent. But what is it for? The answer is to ensure democracy. In publishing the Cotton Op-Ed, and, indeed, in a lot of its political coverage, the Times has forgotten that value. The paper’s often say that their job is to show the news, and let readers decide, to be objective. James Bennet, the editorial page editor, echoed this idea, that the Times published a diversity of ideas. But journalism has many values and all of them are meant to work in the service of true democracy. Maybe the most fundamental of that is to keep society accountable to democracy, to speak truth to power, to be a countervailing force against government. Not to be its tool.

What I’m Recommending:

I haven’t been able to concentrate on much lately, but I did read this fantastic essay from Soraya McDonald about what it means to go for someone’s neck.

Sorry, even cute animal pictures can’t save us from some weeks.