The months between the 2016 presidential election and its accompanying inauguration have not been without controversy for President-elect Donald J. Trump. Scandal seems to follow the former business mogul-turned-prospective leader of the free world, and this has left citizens both inside the U.S. and elsewhere uneasy, dreading any kind of political fiasco, scandalous or otherwise.
This uneasiness culminated into alarm last week when a dossier of documents purported to have linked Trump to Russia in the days leading up to the election was leaked to CNN and BuzzFeed. CNN released news of the reports being shared with Barack Obama and his successor. In turn, BuzzFeed released unabridged versions of the documents.
The dossier itself is currently having its legitimacy argued over. In a press conference to address them Wednesday, Trump denied any connection to the documents or the Kremlin, alleging that the BuzzFeed and CNN reports were falsified. When CNN’s senior White House correspondent Jim Acosta attempted to contest these allegations, the president-elect would have nothing of it, dubbing the entire network as “fake news.”
This served as yet another event in a string of them that points towards Trump’s inability to back out of the media skirmishes that were so constant when he was just a candidate. Soon he will be the president of the United States, a nation renowned for its personal freedoms. By halting any conversation towards his own failures in the eyes of the public, by ostracizing two major media corporations for reporting the news of the time, however tentative, Trump borders on censorship.
Trump will become president of the United States during an age of media proliferation unlike any candidate has faced in the past. The year of 2016 alone saw major shifts in how constituents receive and process their news. And to cast aside any amount of reporting by reputable, highly popular news networks is to certainly limit the dialogue of the day. Because politics and the way it is covered is a dialogue. It is a transmission of ideas, opinions and information across party lines, across demographics and world views. To hinder this process is not only to delegitimize the news companies, but the news itself, which can lead to more conflict.
A braver approach, and certainly one that protects freedoms more, would be to treat the media corporations with a respectful sense of scrutiny, something Trump will surely struggle with. It is undeniable that falsified information played a role in the election, but the answer to curbing this is not to curb information altogether. Trump can't forget that, lest he make a mistake of Orwellian proportions.
The freedom of speech is the most quintessential fragment of liberty the federal government has to offer its citizens. All other liberties hinge on the fact that active, engaged discussion breeds political nuances. Without the utmost care, objecting to media dissension can mirror political tyranny. And, if you ask me, that is a label that has lent itself to the Trump administration far too much already.