The President and the Press

Oct 23, 2009 Editorial

In the Third World, we have got used to the relations between Governments and their press being quite testy, to say the least. In our own Guyana, we have the President and other officials of his administration routinely accusing sections of the media of either being in bed with the administration or actually being a member of the opposition. This newspaper, of recent, has been tagged with the “opposition” label.
The reason touted for this unfortunate state of affairs has always been our politicians’ supposedly underdeveloped appreciation of the role of a free press in a functioning democracy.
In the development of democracy in the west, the press had played a crucial role in exposing the seemingly inevitable abuse of power by the monarchs over the rest of the populace.
Even though the project was funded by the middle class that soon inherited the reins of power in the ensuing democratic dispensation, some members of the press quickly discovered that the new rulers were just as susceptible to the allure of power as those who had been overthrown.
Thus was born the tradition that the press and the media had a fundamental duty to become the watchdog for the people’s interests vis a vis always potentially abusive Executives.
The press therefore became one of the background institutions of functioning democracies and gradually a modus vivendi was arrived at between it and the various governments of the day. The press was seen as merely performing its job when it sought to uncover governmental shenanigans and the government was expected to cooperate in providing information to the press that might even show them in a bad light.
There were “Freedom of Information” laws enacted to formalise the modus vivendi.
The US had been in the forefront of this “civilised” state of affairs so it was with some surprise we noted the recent declaration by President Obama and his administration that Fox News had become a “member of the opposition”. “We’re going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent,” Anita Dunn, the White House communications director, said in an interview with The New York Times.
“As they are undertaking a war against Barack Obama and the White House, we don’t need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations behave.”
What is going on? This kind of language sounds suspiciously like our own, supposedly underdeveloped Third World domestic variety. How are we going to hold the US as exemplars of correct government-press relationship to our own administration if this continues?
The fact of the matter is that there was always a fair bit of pretence about the actual state of relations between US Presidents and their press. President William McKinley labelled a gathering of the press a “congress of inventors,” and President Franklin D. Roosevelt assigned less favoured press members to his “Dunce Club.”
In the dispute with The Times over the Pentagon Papers, Mr. Nixon’s national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, accused the newspaper of treason. The Republican presidents such as Reagan and the two Bushes had routinely accused the press of having a “liberal” bias – a view that gave cold comfort to the beleaguered, but liberal, President Clinton.
So what is the lesson? The history of America has shown that the administrations that took on the press hardly ever came out ahead. Right now Fox’s ratings have jumped 20 per cent after Obama’s denouncement. His administration’s main weapon against Fox will be access to White House news, but this can work against the President for implying that he cannot take the heat in what is supposed to be his greatest area of strength – communication.
In Guyana, we should all – including the President and the members of his administration – accept that the relations between the press and their government will always have an inherent tension. This is democracy at work. However, neither side should allow matters to get out of hand: this would be undemocratic.

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