For something like the sixth or seventh time, I watched the movie “The Post” on TV profiling the controversy surrounding the unauthorized release of what came to be known as “The Pentagon Papers” by former government employee and RAND Corporation operative turned whistleblower, Daniel Ellsberg, during the presidency of Richard Nixon in 1971.
The film is based on the true story and stars Meryl Streep as Katherine Graham, owner and publisher of The Washington Post; Tom Hanks as Ben Bradlee, managing editor and later executive editor; Bruce Greenwood playing Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara; and Mathew Rhys as Daniel Ellsberg. The film was directed by Steven Spielberg in 2017.
“The Pentagon Papers” included over 1000 pages of classified information of the U.S. government’s then 20-year involvement in the Vietnam War and earlier in French Indochina back to the 1940s. The assessment by expert analysts throughout the report was that the U.S. incursion into Vietnam was not a winnable war, and that troops should retreat and pull out of the country.
A series of Presidents going back to Truman and Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and then Nixon failed to inform the public of the true risks of U.S. involvement for the primary reason that these latter presidents did not want to take responsibility for losing the United States’ first war on their watch.
By refusing to accept the narcissistic injury of announcing the truth, they placed an ever-increasing number of primarily young troops as well as the Vietnamese citizens in constant terror and in heightened risk of losing their lives.
The New York Times was the first media outlet to publish excerpts of “The Papers.” A secret source delivered a shoebox full of documents to The Washington Post, when the Nixon administration won a court’s restraining order preventing further publishing by the Times of these documents.
Knowing they could potentially face a lawsuit and possible imprisonment in the charge of contempt of court under the original injunction, and further criminal liability under the Espionage Act, Katherine Graham and Ben Bradlee risked the fact of the Post by publishing further excerpts against the judgement of their corporate lawyer by placing the paper in jeopardy of losing shareholders.
The Post and Times plead their case before the Supreme Court on grounds of their First Amendment rights. Several other newspapers across the U.S. publish information from Ellsberg’s documents in solidarity.
On June 30, 1971, the Supreme Court, in New York Times Co. v. United States, ruled 6–3 in the newspapers’ favor, vindicating Graham’s decision. In response, Richard Nixon became vindictive by barring Post’s employees from ever entering the White House again.
The Wall Street Journal
For some unknown reason, maybe sheer coincidence or possibly because the stars aligned just right, following the film, I turned to my favorite news channel, MSNBC, as important news was breaking.
Alicia Menendez was announcing that The Wall Street Journal had published a letter which the Journal asserted was written by private citizen Donald Trump to his friend Jeffrey Epstein on Epstein’s 50th birthday in 2003. The letter was filled with sexual innuendos and allegedly included a drawing by Trump of the figure of a nude woman with Trump’s signature in the crotch area with the caption:
“Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.”
Trump immediately posted on his misnamed “Truth Social” that he did not and could not have written the letter and that he never “wrote a picture” in his life.
“The Wall Street Journal printed a FAKE letter, supposedly to Epstein,” wrote Trump. “These are not my words, not the way I talk. Also, I don’t draw pictures,” Trump said. “I told Rupert Murdoch it was a Scam, that he shouldn’t print this Fake Story. But he did, and now I’m going to sue his ass off, and that of his third rate newspaper. Thank you for your attention to this matter! DJT”
And again, Trump was caught in his usual lies. Between 1995 and 2020 alone, Trump sold his sketches at auction. For example, in 2005, he sold a rudimentary drawing for $30,000 of New York City. In 2006, he auctioned off another basic sketch of the George Washington Bridge. In 2017, his Empire State Building sketch garnered $16,000 at auction. And in 2020, his “Money Tree” drawing sold for $8,500.
Rupert Murdoch, owner of The Wall Street Journal and other conservative political media outlets such as Fox News, has been consistently supportive of this President, but seemed to stand up to his demands to kill this story.
Who knew that Murdoch had it in him? We will see how long and far the lawsuit goes.
Stephen Colbert’s “Late Show”
As per my weeknight schedule for the past ten years, I tune into Stephen Colbert’s “Late Show” on CBS. The stars continued lining up this night as Stephen began his show in the unusual position seated behind his desk to announce that his parent company, Paramount Global, informed him the day before that they would be cancelling his program effective May 2026.
Their reasoning was “for financial reasons,” which holds absolutely no credibility. As of February 2025, Stephen Colbert’s “Late Show” on CBS had the highest rating in the 11:35 time slot of comedy shows, averaging 2.417 million viewers. Jimmy Kimmel Live! on ABC came in second with an average of 1.77 million viewers, and Jimmy Fallon‘s “Tonight Show” on NBC finished third with 1.188 million viewers.
More likely, Paramount Global cancelled (censored) Stephen for calling out his bosses for surrendering to Trump’s authoritarian frivolous lawsuit in the amount of $16 million dollars for supposedly editing a “60 Minutes” episode in 2024 during the presidential election season with Kamala Harris in a manner not to Trump’s liking.
Stephen, in addition to several media analysts and political commentators, accused the network of bowing down to kiss Trump’s highly inflated squishy buttocks because he had the final say over whether a proposed merger between Skydance Media and Paramount Global, a deal valued at $8 billion, could become final.
The network knew full well that Trump hates Colbert for continually speaking truth to power by calling out his lies, hypocrisy, and downright cruelty.
Trump also sued ABC for defamation after anchor George Stephanopoulos said that Trump had been “found liable for rape” during a March 10, 2024, on-air interview with Republican Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina.
The jury in 2023 found Trump liable for sexual abuse against the writer E. Jean Carroll. The sexual abuse claim included the allegation that Trump forced his fingers inside Carroll against her will. The federal judge who presided over the case later wrote, “the jury implicitly found Mr. Trump did in fact digitally rape Ms. Carroll.”
ABC, however, decided not to contest the lawsuit against them in order to move on.
Lügenpresse
And again, each time a media outlet, a law firm, a university, or any other institution succumbs to the tyranny of a would-be or actual autocrat, it emboldens them even more.
At the Mar-a-lago press conference, Trump enumerated some of the additional media outlets he would go after. He announced his plans to sue the Des Moines Register, the newspaper of note in Iowa. He accused the pollster, J. Ann Selzer of saying that “I was going to lose by three or four points,” after other Iowa surveys reported that he would win the state “by 20 points.” He eventually led Kamala Harris in Iowa by 13 points.
Most recently, Trump barred reporters at the Associated Press from attending various press briefings or from boarding Air Force One with others from the press core over disputes that the AP will not rename the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, as Trump has reclassified it.
Hey, I seriously wonder when Trump will rename Lake Superior as “Lake Trump” and California as the state of “Ivanka”?
Trump’s sustained and vicious attacks on what he refers to as the “dishonest and corrupt” media imperils our very freedom of the press as guaranteed by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Fortunately, the Fourth Estate, while making some mistakes, fact-checks itself and our politicians, including Trump, and by so doing, exposes his lies for what they are, though unfortunately not in person to his face very often.
Trump admitted that he actually likes and has been positively energized by his feud with the media.
“I will be honest. I sort of enjoy this back and forth, and I have all my life, but I have never seen more dishonest people than frankly the political media.”
German Nazis popularized the term Lügenpresse (“lying press”) to intimidate and silence opposition.
Trump seems, however, to like people at Fox “News” and other conservative sources who serve as his apologists and promoters. Fox “News” has operated as the mouthpiece of the conservative segment of the Republican Party since its inception (a virtual Republican Party infomercial), and as the state-supported propaganda machine during Republican administrations much as Pravda (“truth” in Russian), functioned under dictatorial regimes during the former Soviet Union.
Fox “News” promotes “fairness and balance” as Pravda promotes “truth.”
As the infamous quote from Nazi chief propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, makes clear: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”
No matter how Trump and his accomplices wish to characterize the so-called “mainstream press,” gratitude must be showered upon them rather than the scorn and vile bigotry coming from the political right.
Members of the media, our purveyors of facts, ensure the perpetuation of our democratic form of government. While they sometimes get it wrong, when they do, they follow up with retractions, and at times, individual reporters and commentators lose their jobs if malice is proven.
Fox “News” has recently, however, taken Trump to task for his apparent hiding of the truth in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, which amounts to the first cracks in the MAGA movement saga.
I admire not only the center-left to progressive news outlets, reporters, and commentators, but also the courageous conservative Republican-leaning journalists and pundits who speak truth to power, people like Joe Scarborough, Nicole Wallace, Michael Steele (former RNC Chair), and former Fox “News” host, Shepard Smith, who stated in an on-air discussion with another former Fox anchor, Chris Wallace, regarding Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with Russian agents in Trump Tower:
“We’re still not clean on this, Chris. Why all these lies? Why is it lie after lie after lie?”
Donald Trump represents the voice of the alt-right in spreading his alt-facts within his alt-reality universe. Because of our mighty press providing the democracy-saving antidote to the constant stream – in dribs and torrents — of misinformation, lies, and cover ups from this and past administrations, We the People, by informing ourselves, will ensure that our system of government does not perish from the Earth.
And no matter what, the laughing will survive as the jesters continue to call out the would-be king for wearing no clothes.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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