A Free Press

Last night’s Washington Press Dinner was an enormous disappointment, except for Michelle Wolf’s speech.

Our liberal democracy is being dismantled by a hostile foreign government that is attacking democracies in Western Europe and, most obviously, here in the US. They facilitated the election of Donald Trump through espionage, bribery, financial support via unregulated campaign contributions, and collusion between a compromised Republican Party and enormously powerful plutocrats within the GOP – the “corporations are people, my friend” guys such as Robert Mercer and the Koch Brothers. Only a Panglossian meathead could fail to notice how each and every cabinet pick in the Trump regime has systematically dismantled the very agency he/she was appointed to head. This is a war on our democracy being waged by a plutocracy that has sequentially subverted the very institutions conceived to sustain our civil society.

Last night was a singular moment when our free press was expected to stand up and defend itself – stand up to defend the First Amendment in the shadow of the Blitzkrieg being conducted by this corrupt Trump regime. Sarah Huckabee, a home-grown mouthpiece for the Trump apparatus, sat on the dais as an honored guest - and Fox and Friends sat among the attendees. Also among the honored guests were news commentators whose breathless coverage of Trump’s nomination and campaign amounted to an in-kind campaign donation to this autocrat wannabe, a donation worth billions, and far in excess of their contributions to the other candidate. How does a candidate get his message across? In today’s politics, it depends upon how much she has to spend. ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and MSNBC contributed billions of dollars in airtime to Donald Trump and virtually nothing to his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. This should be illegal, and it would have been had the GOP not repealed the FCC's Fairness Doctrine in 1987 under Saint Reagan.

Last night was, sadly, only a mild rebuke. It should have been a major statement of principles excoriating this illegitimate regime’s sustained assault on the 1st Amendment. It should have been a restatement of the reasons why the Fourth Estate is the linchpin that inoculates us against this sort of attempted coup. I think critics of Michelle Wolf’s speech came expecting comedy but left with what they needed – the truth.