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White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer holds the daily press briefing in the James Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House, January 23, 2017 in Washington, DC. ( Chip Somodevilla / GETTY IMAGES )

By Robin V. Sears

Sun., Jan. 29, 2017

Tyrants always respect and fear an independent media, often more than journalisms ordinary readers. They understand its power to reveal their agendas, to mock their follies, and to delegitimize them. Thats why they do their best to demonize and marginalize journalists. From Mussolini to Chavez to Putin and Erdogan, it is a tactic proven successful at least in the short term for tyrants everywhere. Trump has clearly been a student.

His bullying and legal threats to serious journalists did cast a chill on many news organizations. Combined with the huge audiences he delivered to them, in straightened economic times, it made being relentless about a congenital liar difficult.

But the media are one of the three essential guardians of a modern democracy, the others being the judiciary and the military. When the executive branch has control of the legislature and twists it away from democratic practice, judges have often stepped in. This seems a dim hope with this paralyzed conservative Supreme Court.

Military intervention is a nuclear option in a democracy, usually ending in tears. When the revered Israeli military leadership are now quietly discussing moving against the increasingly erratic and unstable Bibi Netanyahu as Israeli media report they have been doing you know that democracy is at risk. One hopes the mere threat of their intervention will impose some discipline on that increasingly isolated and nasty government.

That leaves the media as the sole practical guardians of American democracy. It is a role that many have demonstrated considerable public angst about playing. News organizations from right to left have conducted endless public hand wringing about balance, partisanship and their reputations.

The boundaries between that noble role and bias is surely a very bright line.

If as a journalist you have evidence of misconduct, of bald-faced lying, of policies inimical to agreed American self-interest, you report it. You ensure your sources are bullet-proof, you seek out respected endorsers for your findings. But you report it even if the Trump regime gets advertisers, subscribers and viewers to threaten to walk. A tactic you may be sure they will use.

Tyranny sometimes arrives on quieter feet than burning down the Reichstag. But it always requires threatening and bullying an independent media into submission. Sometimes it is brutal in its repression, but often it succeeds by changing the channel constantly. Introducing irrelevant news stories in response to attack, or staging corny photo ops. Tyrants always use a compliant media to denigrate opponents with phony stories. Like Pravda, in Putins good old days, house organs like Fox and Breitbart have used those tactics with devastating effect.

The institutions of American democracy are marvelously resilient as they have demonstrated for two centuries. They successfully resist attempts to undermine them from the pushback on FDRs attempt to pack the Supreme Court, to Senators successful denunciation of Joe McCarthys witchhunt, to Watergate. Court-packing, witchhunts and genuine abuses of power may soon be back. Key to defeating them is a fearless press not one diverted into nonsense, or bullied into silence.

It is a foolish clich to cite the unpopularity of the media. Lawyers, cops and politicians dont rank much higher. Yet few of us do not cheer when any of them successfully defend justice and defeat the bad guys. When tyrants try to drive the medias reputation down even further its important not to dismiss it, or worse quietly snicker. Failing to smack back at Trumps media taunts is at some point to fail to defend the republic.

If 20-plus million American are suddenly flung out of the health-care system, it will be powerful stories in the New York Times long, expensively produced, eloquently written stories - that will reveal the pain and suffering, forensically documenting this regimes fundamental incompetence to govern. If a witchhunt is launched against opponents, former candidates, and minority communities it will be CNN cameras that will capture the defiance of activists surrounded by SWAT teams, and the night-time raids on immigrant families.

It is not yet clear whether Americans are heading toward a devastating assault on their democracy. Trump is after all a phony whose views flip like a weathervane. If the republic is successfully steered away from that ditch, it will be the best of American journalism in the drivers seat.

For as the courageous former president of Poland, and the current European President, Donald Tusk says, those who cannot see the echoes of a European politics of nearly a century ago in todays political climate are simply being willfully blind. Those tyrannies, whose success was the tragedy of the last century, could not have succeeded without first crushing an independent media.

Robin V. Sears, a principal at Earnscliffe Strategy Group and a Broadbent Institute leadership fellow, was an NDP strategist for 20 years.

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Journalists are the last guardians of our democracy: Sears - Toronto Star