US President Donald Trump. (File photo by Seth Wenig-Pool/Getty Images)
“Of course I didn’t see this loser in the group,” United States national security adviser Mike Waltz said of his historic gaffe of inviting The Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg into a Signal group plotting a Yemen airstrike.
This was not just any loser, but “the bottom-scum of journalists”.
Much has already been written about the obvious, monumental issues this saga exposes: that a frat group chat is nonchalantly deliberating over human life; weighing it up against the distaste of helping the “free-loading” Europeans and celebrating the attack with flame and fist-bump emojis.
But the Trumpian modus operandi of shifting focus by calling into question a journalist’s integrity is equally reprehensible.
It is the continuation of a deliberate trend to undermine the credibility of the profession — both in the spoken and written word. This stratagem not only has disastrous implications for a free-thinking, democratic society, but exacerbates the danger that members of the press already face around the world.
No one needs a reminder of US President Donald Trump’s antipathy to the media over the past decade. But this year it has manifested into a more focused, deliberate assault on press freedom and procedures.
Look no further than the decision to seize control of the White House press pool after more than a century in the hands of journalists themselves.
This comes at a concerning time for the fourth estate. An investigation by the Committee to Protect Journalists in February found that at least 173 journalists have been killed in Gaza since Israel began its invasion in the wake of Hamas’s 7 October attacks.
That figure is unconscionable. Equally shocking is the ambivalence towards it on display in political circles and even sections of the mainstream media.
Conflict reporting has never been safe. But — as much as it is possible to speak generally here — the press badge has been respected for its neutrality and necessity in capturing the historical moment. At the very least there is a legacy of widely condemning any force that wilfully violates that pact.
That palpable protest is no longer happening at the scale that it should be. That extends beyond Gaza to murders in Mexico and repression in Zimbabwe and elsewhere. Apathy is effortlessly fostering impunity.
Washington has always marketed itself as the leader of the free world. As obnoxious as that bromide is, many democracies are all too happy to import their social norms and values from the US. We cannot allow the disregard for the integrity of the journalism profession to become one of those exports.
