Dear ProPublican,
You've almost certainly seen some of the more than 600 tweets President Donald Trump has sent in the last three years using the phrase "fake news." And you've heard the president repeatedly use the phrase "enemy of the people" --- previously a favorite of Robespierre, Stalin, Hitler and Mao, a veritable Mount Rushmore of totalitarianism --- to refer to the press. But I sometimes wonder if people not in our business understand how the current war on journalism plays out day to day. Last week provided an illustration.
Last Wednesday, ProPublica Washington reporter Yeganeh Torbati published a long and meticulously documented piece on how the Trump administration, led in this instance by Vice President Mike Pence, was overriding judgments about foreign aid to funnel money to Christian groups; how some Trump appointees view the constitutional prohibition on the establishment of a state religion or favoritism of one religion over another as a "constraint"; and how officials who don't go along are in danger of being "Penced," or fired.
The story ran more than 4,500 words, with lots of newly reported details. It was picked up by The Washington Post, CNN, Politico and others, and it has been viewed more than 160,000 times on our website. No questions have been raised by anyone about its factual accuracy.
But that afternoon, the U.S. ambassador to Germany, a political appointee named Richard Grenell, decided to respond to a tweet from the reporter explaining what it means at the U.S. Agency for International Development to be "Penced." The ambassador began by asserting, "This isn't a thing." (How he could be sure of this, since he's never worked at USAID, he didn't say.)
Then he added this: "Yeganeh is anti-faith groups. She wants to exclude them."
Let's count the levels on which this is offensive.
First, the ambassador has never met our reporter, so why is he using her first name? Would he do that for a man? Possibly. But two days earlier on Twitter he referred to someone else he doesn't appear to know and of whom he was being critical, former NFL spokesman Joe Lockhart, as "Lockhart."
Next, why invoke this particular first name, Yeganeh? It feels to me like it might be for the same reason some people used to use President Barack Obama's middle name, Hussein: because it sounds foreign. Some people like to use euphemisms about this kind of behavior. I prefer to call it what it seems to me to be, xenophobia and racism. In this case (as in the case of Obama, a native of Hawaii), the purpose is to suggest the person under attack is "not from here." While Grenell might want you to think of Yeganeh Torbati as foreign, she is, as he could have seen from her bio on our site, a native of ... Oklahoma, where she was born and raised.
I am not sure what it would mean to be "anti-faith groups," but it's hard to imagine how the ambassador would have learned about the private views of a person he's never met.
The attempted smear from a man who is supposed to be a diplomat representing our entire country wasn't the only event of last Wednesday I want to call to your attention to. Early that evening, we heard from a "social issues reporter" with the Daily Caller, the web site co-founded by Tucker Carlson of Fox News. The reporter asked for our comment "on a spokesman for Pence calling your story one-sided."
I was pleased to reply with a statement that added to the public record, telling the Daily Caller that "it's highly ironic that the vice president's office did not bother to respond to questions before this story was published but has now found time to call it 'one-sided.'"
I liked that response. Maybe it was sufficiently effective that some people would think the vice president's office got the worse of the exchange. I don't know what they thought at the Daily Caller, but I do know no story ever ran.
On Thursday, The Washington Times published a story that included Pence's office's critique of our story as "one-sided." The Times did not bother to call us for comment or to inform its readers that our story included Pence's refusal to comment.
We also pointed out that the vice president's staff had failed to answer our questions. I thought you might want to see what that entails, so we have posted all of the reporter's questions to the vice president's office. They're here. There were more than 25 specific questions in five emails over a period of 15 days. (We've omitted portions of the questions relating to material we didn't ultimately publish.) The vice president's press secretary didn't answer any of them.
I have taken you through all of this not because it is unusual, but because it is not. There is a war underway against journalism in this country. It is being fought by powerful people who would like to see their use of power go unexamined, and therefore unchecked. Attacks like those described above happen every day. You need to know that.
We decided to call this newsletter "Not Shutting Up" because, in the first days of the current administration, a senior White House staffer said the press "should just shut up." That is still the hope of some. It remains our intention not to comply.
Best, Dick