Unfreedom of the Press

by Mark R. Levin

  The abandonment of objective truth and, worse, the rejection of the principles and values of America’s early press and revolutionaries, is not new for the Times. It long predates the Trump presidency. And it has led the Times and other media outlets into a very bleak and dark place, destructive of the press as a crucial institution for a free people. If newsrooms and journalists do not act forthwith and with urgency to “fundamentally transform” their approach to journalism, which, sadly, is highly unlikely, their credibility will continue to erode and may well reach a point soon where it is irreparably damaged with a large portion of the citizenry—and rightly so. The media will not only marginalize themselves, but they will continue to be the greatest threat to freedom of the press today—not President Trump or his administration, but the current practitioners of what used to be journalism.

  Therefore, as I said at the opening, this book is intended to, among other things, “jump-start a long overdue and hopefully productive dialogue among the American citizenry on how best to deal with the complicated and complex issue of the media’s collapsing role as a bulwark of liberty, the civil society, and republicanism.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Writing a book is a family effort. It involves very long hours, at all times of the day and night, including weekends and holidays. I am blessed to have a very tolerant and understanding family, starting with my amazing wife, Julie. She not only endures my crazy hours and the mood swings authors experience during the research and writing process, but she is an indispensable partner and sounding board for my thoughts and ideas. Julie is a brilliant lawyer in her own right, and she not only made this a better book, but she came up with the title!

  I cannot say enough about our wonderful children and grandchildren: Lauren, Chase, David, Jenna, Nick, Sloane, and Asher. They are outstanding human beings in every way and bring us much joy. I could not be prouder of each and every one of them. To my big brother, Doug, you are one of the most decent and kind people I have ever had the honor to know. You are an inspiration to everyone who knows you. And to our dear Sylvia, of the greatest generation, whom we adore and who inspires all of us with her wisdom, energy, and kindness.

  Finally, I posthumously thank my beloved parents, Jack and Norma, who recently passed from this life to the next, just four months apart, and who will be forever together and loved in perpetuity by their family. So, too, Leo Strauss, who left an indelible mark on his children and grandchildren, and who will always be a shining light.

  More from the Author

  Rediscovering…

  Plunder and Deceit

  The Liberty Amendments

  George Washington: The…

  Abraham Lincoln's…

  Ameritopia

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  © ABC RADIO NETWORK

  MARK R. LEVIN, nationally syndicated talkradio host, host of LevinTV, chairman of the Landmark Legal Foundation, and the host of the FOX News show Life, Liberty & Levin, is the author of five consecutive New York Times #1 bestsellers: Liberty and Tyranny, Plunder and Deceit, Rediscovering Americanism, Ameritopia, and The Liberty Amendments. Liberty and Tyranny spent three months at #1 and sold more than 1.5 million copies. His books Men in Black and Rescuing Sprite were also New York Times bestsellers. Levin is an inductee of the National Radio Hall of Fame and was a top adviser to several members of President Ronald Reagan’s cabinet. He holds a BA from Temple University and a JD from Temple University Law School.

  www.MarkLevinShow.com

  @MARKLEVINSHOW

  SimonandSchuster.com

  ThresholdEditions @Threshold_Books

  Authors.SimonandSchuster.com/Mark-R-Levin

  ALSO BY MARK R. LEVIN

  Rediscovering Americanism

  Plunder and Deceit

  The Liberty Amendments

  Ameritopia

  Liberty and Tyranny

  Rescuing Sprite

  Men in Black

  We hope you enjoyed reading this Simon & Schuster ebook.

  Get a FREE ebook when you join our mailing list. Plus, get updates on new releases, deals, recommended reads, and more from Simon & Schuster. Click below to sign up and see terms and conditions.

  CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP

  Already a subscriber? Provide your email again so we can register this ebook and send you more of what you like to read. You will continue to receive exclusive offers in your inbox.

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION: UNFREEDOM OF THE PRESS

  1 U.S. Constitution, Preamble.

  1. NEWS AS POLITICAL AND IDEOLOGICAL ACTIVISM

  1 Hutchins Commission, “A Free and Responsible Press,” 1947, in The Journalist’s Moral Compass, Basic Principles, Steven R. Knowlton and Patrick R. Parsons, eds. (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1995), 209.

  2 Ibid., 210

  3 Ibid.

  4 Jeffrey M. Jones., “U.S. Media Trust Continues to Recover from 2016 Low,” Gallup, October 12, 2018, https://news.gallup.com/poll/243665/media-trust-continues-recover-2016-low.aspx (March 16, 2019).

  5 Ibid.

  6 “Mike Drop” interview with Lara Logan, February 15, 2019, iHeart Radio, https://www.iheart.com/podcast/867-mike-drop-29170721/episode/023-lara-logan-30567470 (March 16, 2019).

  7 Ibid.

  8 Lara Logan, appearing on Hannity, February 20, 2019, Fox News Corp.

  9 Hutchins Commission, “A Free and Responsible Press,” 218–19.

  10 Knight Foundation, “Public trust in the media is at an all-time low. Results from a major new Knight-Gallup report can help us understand why,” Medium.com, January 15, 2018, https://medium.com/trust-media-and-democracy/10-reasons-why-americans-dont-trust-the-media-d0630c125b9e (March 16, 2019).

  11 Ibid.

  12 Ibid.

  13 Ibid.

  14 Hutchins Commission, “A Free and Responsible Press,” 221–22.

  15 Bill Kovach and Tom Rosentiel, The Elements of Journalism (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2007), 5.

  16 Ibid., 5–6.

  17 Ibid., 6.

  18 Ibid., 7.

  19 Ibid., 240,

  20 Ibid., 82.

  21 Ibid., 81.

  22 Ibid., 82.

  23 Ibid., 83.

  24 Tim Groseclose, Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2011), vii.

  25 Ibid., 111.

  26 Ibid., 111–12.

  27 American Press Institute, “Understanding Bias,” https://www.americanpressinstitute.org/journalism-essentials/bias-objectivity/understanding-bias (March 16, 2019).

  28 Lars Willnut and David H. Weaver, “The American Journalist in the Digital Age,” Indiana University School of Journalism, 2014, http://archive.news.indiana.edu/releases/iu/2014/05/2013-american-journalist-key-findings.pdf (March 16, 2019).

  29 Hadas Gold, “Survey: 7 Percent of Reporters Identify as Republican,” Politico, May 6 2014, https://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2014/05/survey-7-percent-of-reporters-identify-as-republican-188053 (March 16, 2019).

  30 Media Research Center, “The Liberal Media: Every Poll Shows Journalists Are More Liberal than the American Public—and the Public Knows It,” https://www.mrc.org/special-reports/liberal-mediaevery-poll-shows-journalists-are-more-liberal-american-public-—-and (March 16, 2019).

  31 Andrew C. Call, Scott A. Emett, Eldar Maksymov, and Nathan Y. Sharp, “Meet the Press: Survey Evidence on Financial Journalists as Information Intermediaries,” December 27, 2018, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3279453 (March 16, 2019).

  32 Dave Levinthal and Michael Beckel, “Journalists Shower Hillary Clinton with Campaign Cash,” Center for Public Integrity, October 18, 2016, https://www.publicintegrity.org/2016/10/17/20330/journalists-shower-hillary-clinton-campaign-cash (March 16, 2019).

  33 Elspeth Reeve, “Rick Stengal Is at Least the 24th Journalist to Work for the Obama Administration,” Atlantic, September 12, 2013, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/09/rick-stengel-least-24-
journalist-go-work-obama-administration/310928/ (March 16, 2019).

  34 Paul Farhi, “Media, Administration Deal with Conflicts,” Washington Post, June 12, 2013, https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/media-administration-deal-with-conflicts/2013/06/12/e6f98314-ca2e-11e2-8da7-d274bc611a47_story.html?utm_term=.630777c069c4 (March 16, 2019).

  35 Jack Shafer and Tucker Doherty, “The Media Bubble Is Worse than You Think,” Politico, May/June 2017, https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/04/25/media-bubble-real-journalism-jobs-east-coast-215048 (March 16, 2019).

  36 Ibid.

  37 Thomas E. Patterson, “News Coverage of Donald Trump’s First 100 Days,” Harvard Kennedy School, Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy, May 18, 2017, https://shorensteincenter.org/news-coverage-donald-trumps-first-100-days (March 16, 2019).

  38 I am the host of Life, Liberty & Levin, which airs Sunday nights on Fox.

  39 Thomas E. Patterson, “News Coverage of Donald Trump’s First 100 Days.”

  40 Pew Research Center, Project for Excellence in Journalism, “Obama’s First 100 Days: How the President Fared in the Press vs. Clinton and Bush,” April 28, 2009, http://www.journalism.org/2009/04/28/obamas-first-100-days (March 16, 2019).

  41 Media Research Center, “Media Bias 101,” January 2014, http://www.mrc.org/sites/default/files/uploads/documents/2014/MBB2014.pdf (March 16, 2019).

  42 Jay Rosen, “Donald Trump Is Crashing the System. Journalists Need to Build a New One,” Washington Post, July 13, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/in-theory/wp/2016/07/13/donald-trump-is-crashing-the-system-journalists-need-to-build-a-new-one/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.6dfd02937907 (March 16, 2019).

  43 Ibid.

  44 Alicia C. Shepard, “The Gospel of Public Journalism,” American Journalism Review, September 1994, http://ajrarchive.org/Article.asp?id=1650 (March 16, 2019), 28–34.

  45 Ibid.

  46 Amitai Etzioni, The Spirit of Community: Rights, Responsibilities, and the Communitarian Agenda (New York: Crown, 1993), 2.

  47 John Dewy, Liberalism and Social Action (New York: Prometheus Books, 1991), 65–66.

  48 Ibid., 66.

  49 Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Renaissance Classics, 2012), 299 (chapter 27, “The Appeal to the Public,” section 1).

  50 Ibid., 300.

  51 Ibid., 302.

  52 Charles R. Kesler, “Faking It,” Claremont Review of Books, Summer 2018, https://www.claremont.org/crb/article/faking-it/ (March 16, 2019).

  53 Ibid.

  54 Jay Rosen, What Are Journalists For? (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 19–20.

  55 John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1927), 179–80.

  56 Ibid., 180–81.

  57 Matthew Pressman, On Press (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 1–2.

  58 Ibid., 23.

  59 Ibid., 23–24.

  60 Thomas Edsall, “Journalism Should Own Its Liberalism,” Columbia Journalism Review, October 8, 2009, https://archives.cjr.org/campaign_desk/journalism_should_own_its_libe.php (March 16, 2019).

  61 Art Swift, “Six in 10 in U.S. See Partisan Bias in News Media,” Gallup, April 5, 2017, https://news.gallup.com/poll/207794/six-partisan-bias-news-media.aspx (March 16, 2019).

  62 Edsall, “Journalism Should Own Its Liberalism.”

  63 Ibid.

  64 Ibid.

  65 Kovach and Rosentiel, The Elements of Journalism, 235.

  66 Kesler, “Faking It.”

  2. THE EARLY PATRIOT PRESS

  1 Isaiah Thomas, The History of Printing in America (London: Forgotten Books, 2012), 14.

  2 Ibid., 15.

  3 Ibid., 15–16.

  4 Ibid., 17.

  5 Ibid., 18.

  6 Ibid., 136.

  7 Ibid., 136–39.

  8 David A. Copeland, The Idea of a Free Press (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2006), 206–7.

  9 Ibid., 207 (spelling, italics, and capitalizations in original).

  10 Carol Sue Humphrey, The American Revolution and the Press (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2013), 3–4.

  11 Ibid., 5.

  12 Ibid.

  13 Copeland, The Idea of a Free Press, 15.

  14 Bernard Bailyn, Pamphlets of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), 8.

  15 Ibid., viii.

  16 Ibid., 17–19.

  17 Ibid., 19.

  18 Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 8.

  19 National Constitution Center, “How Thomas Paine’s other pamphlet saved the Revolution,” December 19, 2018, https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/how-thomas-paines-other-pamphlet-saved-the-revolution (March 16, 2019).

  20 Thomas Paine, Common Sense, February 14, 1776, http://www.ushistory.org/paine/commonsense/ (March 16, 2019).

  21 Ibid.

  22 Ibid.

  23 Ibid.

  24 Ibid.

  25 Ibid.

  26 Ibid.

  27 Ibid.

  28 Humphrey, The American Revolution and the Press, 12.

  29 Ibid., 15.

  30 Ibid., 202–3.

  31 Woodrow Wilson, “Fourth of July Address on the Declaration of Independence,” appearing in Classics of American Political & Constitutional Thought, vol. 2, (Cambridge, MA: Hackett, 2007), 318 (italics added).

  32 Ibid.

  3. THE MODERN DEMOCRATIC PARTY-PRESS

  1 Charles L. Ponce De Leon, “Press and Politics,” in The Concise Princeton Encyclopedia of American Policy History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 399.

  2 Ibid.

  3 Jim A. Kuypers, Partisan Journalism (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), 18.

  4 Peter Onuf, “Thomas Jefferson: Campaigns and Elections,” University of Virginia Miller Center, https://millercenter.org/president/jefferson/campaigns-and-elections (March 16, 2019).

  5 Ibid.

  6 “Candidacy,” Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage, https://thehermitage.com/learn/andrew-jackson/president/candidacy (March 16, 2019).

  7 Ibid.

  8 Kuypers, Partisan Journalism, 21.

  9 Ibid., 22–23.

  10 Ibid., 23.

  11 Harold Holzer, Lincoln and the Power of the Press (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), Introduction, xxi.

  12 Andrew Malcolm, “Media’s Anti-Trump Addiction Amps Up the Outrage and Fuels the Public’s Suspicion,” Miami Herald, January 15, 2019, https://www.miamiherald.com/article224535145.html (March 16, 2019).

  13 Ibid.

  14 Ibid.

  15 Matthew Continetti, “How Trump Survives,” National Review, September 1, 2018, https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/trump-survives-thanks-to-economy-and-detractors/ (March 16, 2019).

  16 Jennifer Harper, “Media Mulled Impeaching Trump Even Before He Was Elected,” Washington Times, December 9, 2018, https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/dec/9/inside-the-beltway-media-mulled-impeaching-trump-b (March 16, 2019).

  17 Bill D’Agostino, “CNN, MSNBC Say ‘Impeachment’ 222 Times in One Day,” MRC NewsBusters, August 23, 2018, https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/bill-dagostino/2018/08/23/cnn-msnbc-say-impeachment-222-times-one-day (March 16, 2019).

  18 Letter from Attorney General William Barr to House and Senate Committees on the Judiciary, March 24, 2019, available on Lawfare, https://lawfareblog.com/document-attorney-general-barr-letter-mueller-report (March 28, 2019).

  19 Michael W. Chapman, “What the Liberal Media Actually Say About Trump, a.k.a. ‘Hitler, Madman, Dictator, Racist,’ ” cnsnews.com, October 29, 2018, https://www.cnsnews.com/blog/michael-w-chapman/what-liberal-media-actually-say-about-trump-aka-hitler-mussolini-white (March 16, 2019) (emphasis added).

  20 John Nolte, “List: 24 Pieces of MSM Fake News in 5 Days,” Daily Wire, January 31, 2017, https://www.dailywire.com/news/13001/omg-list-last-week-msm-spread-much-fake-news-john-nolte (March 16, 2
019).

  21 Daniel Payne, “16 Fake News Stories Reporters Have Run Since Trump Won,” Federalist, February 6, 2017, http://thefederalist.com/2017/02/06/16-fake-news-stories-reporters-have-run-since-trump-won/ (March 16, 2019).

  22 Sharyl Attkisson, “75 Media Mistakes in the Trump Era: The Definitive List,” Sharylattkisson.com, March 3, 2019, https://sharylattkisson.com/50-media-mistakes-in-the-trump-era-the-definitive-list/ (March 16, 2019).

  23 Jason Leopold and Anthony Cormier, “President Trump Directed His Attorney Michael Cohen to Lie to Congress About the Moscow Tower Project,” BuzzFeednews.com, January 18, 2019, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jasonleopold/trump-russia-cohen-moscow-tower-mueller-investigation (March 16, 2019).

  24 Ibid.

  25 See, generally, https://www.newsbusters.org/media-places/buzzfeed?page=0%2C1 (March 16, 2019).

  26 Amber Athey, “CNN and MSNBC Repeatedly Floated Impeachment Over Disputed BuzzFeed Report,” Daily Caller, January 18, 2019, https://dailycaller.com/2019/01/18/cnn-msnbc-impeach-trump-buzzfeed-mueller/ (March 16, 2019).