The first thing that struck me when I sat down to hear a lecture by CNN’s White House correspondent Jim Acosta was the median age of the audience. (Acosta’s new book, “The Enemy of the People: A Dangerous Time to Tell the Truth in America” will be published Tuesday, June 11, by HarperCollins.) I was sitting in a sea of white hair, balding heads and comfortably wrinkled faces. It turns out most of the audience were members of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Berkshire Community College.
The only reason I even had a seat in the packed auditorium at the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center May 24 was that my octogenarian mother had the time to pick up the free tickets as soon as they were available to the public. While I was thrilled to see so many people show up to hear a lecture about a press we can still deem as “free,” I was disheartened by the lack of young faces. There were very few people in the audience under the age of 50 and even fewer under 30.
Where are the millennials? Generation X, which ranges from those born in the mid-1960s to the early 1980s, was sparsely represented and I could only spot two women from the youthful Generation Z. Granted, it was the first evening of a long weekend, but one hopes to see some of our youngest citizens educating themselves about a freedom we have long taken for granted in this country. I believe a lot of young people are ignorant as to what we could lose in this land of ours should the Trump conservatives roll back all the protections and programs which so many of us take for granted.
The loss of legal and safe abortion is a clear frontrunner as a vocal and religious minority tries to drag us back into the 1950s, but just as disconcerting is the attack on a media that has long been protected under the First Amendment. It’s not the first time this has happened and it won’t be the last. During the Nixon administration, the White House continuously said that Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein made up stories—and we know how that played out.
What Acosta stressed was resistance and perseverance. I would like to add that we should all look at different sources and check stories for accuracy before posting them online. Rebut alternative facts. Just as important, however, is the need for journalists to do their jobs—and to do so safely. Acosta said he regularly receives death threats and has had to rely on armed guards to keep himself and his family safe. A quick internet search reveals numerous reporters and editors killed over the years for publishing current events, from abolitionists to five employees gunned down at work for the Capital Gazette in Maryland last year. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, there were 34 worldwide confirmed murders of journalists last year, including those killed in Maryland. Thirty-eight Russian journalists have been confirmed killed since 1992, and of those, 33 were killed with “impunity.” This does not include those poor souls killed while covering battles or other dangerous assignments.
What has happened to our country that someone like Cesar Sayoc thought it was perfectly fine to mail homemade bombs last year to anyone opposing Trump and his agenda? Those targeted were politicians and journalists. The question is redundant, of course, since Trump repeatedly screams that anything with which he disagrees is “fake news” and that journalists are “enemies of the people.” If you say something often enough, a certain percentage of the population will believe you.
Just as frightening is the prosecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for espionage. Granted, Assange is an odious man, but he did not actually spy on anyone. He published classified documents leaked to him by former army intelligence officer Chelsea Manning. Assange is a publisher, not a journalist and not a foreign agent. I cannot see how this case could be successfully prosecuted, but we live in an upside-down world these days that sits closer to Orwellian fiction than the America of my youth. Should courts stacked with judges loyal to our present Trumpian reality side against him, we could very well see First Amendment freedoms evaporate. As things now stand, we are not far from Winston Smith’s world in “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” but we still have hope and the legal right to protest and publish as we see fit.
