CSotD: International Obedience Day
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It’s not really International Obedience Day, and this isn’t a new cartoon.
It’s World Press Freedom Day and Molina’s cartoon dates from 2019. I’m featuring it because I particularly like it and because I’m sorry that Molina is still here in America, having fled Nicaragua because there wasn’t a whole lot of press freedom there.
Perhaps he should have gone to Canada, because the days of “It Can’t Happen Here” are clearly over. But if we all pull together, we’ll quell this outbreak of authoritarianism here before it erupts into full-blown fascism.
And if we don’t, that’ll be it.
Molina’s cartoon is featured along with several others at Cartooning for Peace’s site, where they are celebrating the day.
This is actually the second-place winner in the 25th World Press Freedom International Editorial Cartoon Competition, and Bado has the collection of honorees on his blog. You may find some you like better, because I think the judges must have had some difficulty in making their decisions. It’s quite a lineup.
Also, if you’re in the DC area, you can go over to Syracuse University’s Washington campus for this celebration Monday. Odd scheduling but a dynamite lineup.
And wouldn’t it be nice if press freedom were a simple matter of big bad dictators crushing brave righteous journalists?
Wuerker notes a particularly thorny issue, which is that free speech and press freedom mean the right to criticize government actions, but when a government is inextricably linked to a religion or ethnicity, it can be hard to separate its two identities.
That’s true of Israel, but it’s also true of Iran. Tel Aviv is full of Jews who object to the war in Gaza, and Tehran is full of Muslims who oppose the Supreme Council and its harsh political and societal restrictions.
You can criticize either government without being antisemitic or islamophobic, though you will find yourself with unappealing allies.
“Politics makes strange bedfellows,” and it is immoral to let pride stand in the way of justice.
F’rinstance, we’re still debating the ACLU’s defense of a neonazi group that wanted to march in Skokie 48 years ago. It’s hard to get over the instinct that says free expression only applies when answers are easy and the opinions are something we agree with.
I think it was Rousseau who opined that, in a democracy, you can’t vote to give up democracy. It made an interesting discussion in college, but the topic’s not so entertaining when it appears to actually be happening.
Breen is certainly right, and we know who is holding that can of Diet Coke. We also know that press freedom is very much on the docket here in the United States, because our fellow citizens voted into power an administration that considers dissent to be disloyalty.
It goes deeper than press freedom. In a podcast with Charlie Sykes the other day, Adam Kinsingner noted that there was a time not so long ago when the Speaker of the House was always a member of the majority party, but saw the Speaker’s role as a duty to see that the House ran smoothly and properly. He was a party member and his own loyalties naturally skewed in that direction, but his overall obligation was bipartisan.
Perhaps you had to have been there, because today the Speaker is combatively partisan.
We seem engaged in a pilot program to see if non-citizens with legal status can be arrested and deported for having written or spoken out against government policy, at least if they are mixed in with undocumented aliens who may or may not be affiliated with gangs.
The legal theory, such as it is, is that publicly questioning a government stance is a threat to our foreign policy. It’s getting generally negative reactions from the courts, but the administration is already announcing plans to extend this program to include deporting citizens and to limit the press’s ability to gather information.
There was a time when a reporter could count on being supported when the free press was threatened, but we’ve recently seen major media companies bend the knee.
It’s been a gradual slide. Twenty years ago, Judith Miller spent 85 days in jail for refusing to reveal her source for a story that displeased the GW Bush administration, and the New York Times subsequently began to question her work, then fired her.
And those were still the Good Old Days.
The executive branch has always been driven by loyalty, but checked by the other two branches of government and by the ethical standards of its own people.
The current cabinet is a collection not of loyal counselors but of questionably competent toadies who, if the televised meetings are typical, begin each session with a round of fawning compliments for Dear Leader.
It is clear that he no longer gets the pushback he experienced in his first administration, that “legal” and “loyal” have become synonyms, and that his bootlickers are interchangeable.
Moreover, when several polls showed his popularity cratering, Dear Leader declared them all wrong, described the pollsters as criminals and suggested they be investigated and jailed.
Trump not only demands abject loyalty of his cabinet and staff, but expects it of universities, and, as Davies suggests, is tougher on those who teach young people history, logic and other subversive topics than on those who invade our nation’s allies.
He has also issued a fatwa against NPR and PBS because the tone of their reporting is not sufficiently obsequious and is therefore dishonest and slanted.
This after he attempted to cut funding for the Voice of America and other international efforts to provide news services to countries without a free press. Jones’s essay on the topic is worth your time.
Zyglis, however, is more specific in mocking Trump for demanding a level of independence of public broadcasting that is not mirrored in his own words and actions.
While in a moment of seeing ourselves as others see us, Schopf offers a view of America’s self-revising press in the era of Trump, and if we’re not there yet, we are certainly on the road that leads in that direction.
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