Targeting the media

After US President Donald Trump devoted much of his Kafkaesque press conference on Thursday to attack the American media for not depicting his first few weeks in office in favourable light, and describing them as “fake”, on Twitter next day he called them “the enemy of the American people”. Marquee media names like the New York Times, CNN “and many others” were placed in this category by the leader of the “free world”.

In that world, a media independent of the state apparatus is evidently no longer a requirement, bringing it unobtrusively closer to authoritarian regimes, one-party states and despotisms of varying description. This takes away one of the defining features of American life.

The Chinese appear to be truly excited. Beijing’s English-language publication Global Times noted editorially that the American leader’s “war with (his country’s) mainstream media makes it difficult for Trump to ally with the media on the ideological front against China”. That, however, is unlikely to be true. The Chinese may not believe this, but the US media doesn’t criticise them as it takes dictation from its government, even if it is the case that the US media’s take on key questions relating to developing countries doesn’t vary too much from that of US administrations by and large.

Indian leaders too like to manipulate the media to their advantage and hate it when the media sings its own song. If the Chinese call their press people “news workers”, PM Narendra Modi, when campaigning in the 2014 general election, derisively called them “news traders”.