An electoral campaign based on fake news, disinformation and populism. An authoritarian drift to impose an unprecedented protectionist economic policy and expel migrants from the United States by executive order. Donald Trump is the eye of a hurricane engulfing a world immersed in confusion and the difficulty of distinguishing plausibility from facts. Martin Baron, well-known journalist and former director of Washington Post and the The Boston Globeseeks to respond and provide optimism to a traditional press forced to dissect new technologies to maintain the democratic principles on which it is based. “The United States has been a model of freedom, but we are no longer one. Independent journalism has lost the country’s vital support, and this indicates that we have lost our soul. I no longer take press freedom in the United States for granted,” added Baron this Friday in Barcelona, at the end of the Metafuturo conference organized by Atresmedia.
The Dana tragedy which devastated the province of Valencia a year ago and caused more than 200 deaths demonstrated, according to Baron, that in extreme situations “society continues to trust the press”. This was said in a later conversation during the event with journalist Ana Pastor. However, during that catastrophe figure in the form of influencers and pseudo-journalists who tried to confuse public opinion and question certainties. “Journalists must provide the public with the information it needs to determine its future. This is the call of our institution. Often the voices of victims are silenced and gagged,” Baron lamented. The same thing was seen when all of Spain went dark on April 28 and the radio took to the streets to report with the rigor that populism calls into question.
No country is exempt from the threats posed by interrogative journalism that keeps lies at bay. A lie that, according to Baron, is “endemic to the United States government.” The Pulitzer Prize winner who captained the The Boston Globe The investigation into sexual abuse in the Catholic Church of Massachusetts believes that fear has spread among journalists in their country due to the interests of media owners. “The vulnerable point of the press in the country is the ownership of the media because they have to respond to commercial interests. Journalists on the front lines are more afraid of their owners than of President Trump. They fear that there will be a change of political position in the management,” he argues.
Trump’s attacks on the press are a constant. From publicly belittling the atrocious murder of the Saudi journalist Washington Post Jamal Khashoggi even called a reporter Bloomberg In the middle of the Air Force One flight, the Republican leader does not cease his personal hostility against the freedom of the press. A right that, among other things, is included in the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. “It’s a shame. I never thought I’d hear a president speak like that,” Baron lamented.
“What Trump wants is for journalists to be stenographers or propagandists, always subservient.” Baron thus referred to the expulsion from the Pentagon of journalists critical of the institution’s policies and who were prevented from publishing anything that was not officially published by the headquarters of the Department of Defense, renamed the War Department by Trump himself.
The problem extends not only to public administrations, but also to large technology companies that serve a government, in Baron’s words, of “open corruption”. When asked about the role of fact-checkers in the new technological era, the journalist expressed concern about the elimination of these filters in the United States. “Facebook does not publish verifiers in the United States because Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Meta, gave in to pressure from Trump. Zuckerberg did not want to antagonize him because he threatened to jail him for his verification policy and for deleting his Facebook account,” he noted.
Despite everything, he sees the end of the Trump era as near. Baron is convinced that although the Republican believes he can find a loophole in American legislation to run for the White House for a third time, there is none. “It is true that the opposition is not too strong. The Democrats are looking for their own way because they do not have a good reputation among the American people,” he concluded.
