Actor Robert Redford, who will be forever associated with the Watergate-scandal film "All the President's Men," has just written an article in which he expresses, in a surprisingly fair-minded and neutral manner, his fears for truth in the era of fake news and media/president hostility. I agreed with most of Mr. Redford's article; there's only one section where Redford gets explicitly leftist (or so a rightie would think):
When President Trump speaks of being in a “running war” with the media, calls them “among the most dishonest human beings on Earth” and tweets that they’re the “enemy of the American people,” his language takes the Nixon administration’s false accusations of “shoddy” and “shabby” journalism to new and dangerous heights.
Everything else in the article strikes me as something that people on both sides of the aisle would agree on. "Sound and accurate journalism defends our democracy. It's one of the most effective weapons we have to restrain the power-hungry," Redford writes. Who would disagree with that? I can imagine people on the right wanting to add the caveat that today's mainstream journalism is neither sound nor accurate—my previous post was an example of exactly that point—but Redford's article says nothing about the current state of the press, so it's hard to know precisely what Redford thinks (well, that's not strictly true: we can surely guess). In any event, I think that, no matter which side of the aisle you're on (or even if you're a straddler), you'll find something in Redford's short piece to nod your head at.
Or maybe you won't.
No comments:
Post a Comment