The media starts to fold

David Frum, writing ‘The Sound of Fear on Air’ for The Atlantic (I recommend reading the whole piece, but these excerpts will give you the gist):

I was invited onto MSNBC’s Morning Joe to talk from a studio in Washington, D.C., about an article I’d written on Trump’s approach to foreign policy. Before getting to the article, I was asked about the nomination of Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense–specifically about an NBC News report that his heavy drinking worried colleagues at Fox News and at the veterans organizations he’d headed. […]

I answered by reminding viewers of some history:

In 1989, President George H. W. Bush nominated John Tower, senator from Texas, for secretary of defense. Tower was a very considerable person, a real defense intellectual, someone who deeply understood defense, unlike the current nominee. It emerged that Tower had a drinking problem, and when he was drinking too much he would make himself a nuisance or worse to women around him. And for that reason, his nomination collapsed in 1989. You don’t want to think that our moral standards have declined so much that you can say: Let’s take all the drinking, all the sex-pesting, subtract any knowledge of defense, subtract any leadership, and there is your next secretary of defense for the 21st century.

At the next ad break, a producer spoke into my ear. He objected to my comments about Fox and warned me not to repeat them. I said something noncommittal and got another round of warning. After the break, I was asked a follow-up question on a different topic, about President Joe Biden’s pardon of his son. I did not revert to the earlier discussion, not because I had been warned, but because I had said my piece. I was then told that I was excused from the studio chair. Shortly afterward, co-host Mika Brzezinski read an apology for my remarks. […]

I do not write to scold anyone; I write because fear is infectious. Let it spread, and it will paralyze us all.

The only antidote is courage. And that’s infectious, too.

For as long as I can remember, we have known Russian and Chinese media to be unreliable due to the stranglehold that the government has on it. Through bribe, threat, or law, the media does the government’s bidding in those places.

It is an ominous sign that Morning Joe felt it had to apologize for something I said.

In the United States, we’re supposed to hold our right to free speech to be self-evident, guaranteed by our Constitution. But what I’m seeing is evidence that with Trump’s continuous threats against media, there’s no need for a constitutional amendment to negate that right. They’ve already started to police themselves.

How does Democracy fall? Slowly, then all at once. The only antidote is courage, indeed. And what is “constitution” but the courage and strength to stand behind what you believe in.