Americans love their caps. Even folks who aren’t big baseball fans wear caps that signal their fandom of one product or another, or of a particular team. We like you to know right upfront, as soon as you face us, who we are. Most of us even know which “NY” cap signals a Yankees fan or a Mets fan, but it takes a discerning eye to look at an “SD” cap and differentiate between fans of the San Diego Padres and the mighty Jackrabbits of South Dakota State University, or to figure out whether we’re facing a fan of the St. Louis Cardinals or an alumnus of St. Lawrence University.
But I’ve never been much of a cap wearer until recently, and the change isn’t because of the increasing wispiness of my hair as I age. No, lately I tend to choose one of two black caps that I’ve obtained over the years: One bears the AP logo, of the Associated Press. The other is a Voice of America hat. So yes, I’m making a statement by my headgear, so you’ll know right away that I’m a fanboy of independent media.
The AP and Voice of America are both targets of Donald Trump’s campaign against free speech – and I don’t think that’s an exaggeration of what’s going on here. Trump is not fighting “woke bias” in the media, as his enablers and sycophants would have it; he is trying to control what people know so that he can be free to pursue his agenda of destruction of the values that have powered our society forward through all the many years of his life.
So let’s be clear about what’s at stake in his attacks on these truth-tellers.
Voice of America is owned by the U.S. government, and unless you’ve lived overseas, you’ve probably never heard one of its broadcasts. Until the middle of last month, though, VOA had broadcast news – real news, not propaganda – to hundreds of millions of listeners, viewers and readers around the world. It has been doing that since it was founded in 1942 to combat Nazi propaganda. In many nations, Voice of America was the only source of unbiased, energetic news coverage – a clear statement to the world, including many oppressed nations, of America’s commitment to free speech. And now it is gone, its 1,300 journalists laid off, its broadcasts silenced, leaving a void that surely will be replaced by other nations’ propaganda outlets.
The AP, by contrast, isn’t a government agency; it’s a non-profit news cooperative, owned by its newspaper and broadcast members. The AP’s 280 bureaus around the world, its 4,300 employees, each day produce some 2,000 text stories, 3,000 photos and 200 news videos. But the President of the United States was ticked off when the AP declined to follow his decree that the Gulf of Mexico must henceforth be called the Gulf of America – and so, in a typical Trump tantrum, he banished AP reporters from White House events. That was an unconstitutional infringement on free speech, a federal court has ruled – it was retribution by the most powerful official of our democracy for not following his orders as to what it should and should not publish. But Trump is still trying to ice out AP, notwithstanding the court ruling; he is giving right-wing web sites the spots in the White House press pool that used to be rotated among wire services. So this will surely go a few more rounds in the courts.
It's not only AP and VOA that are in Trump’s crosshairs as independent media. The government has funded other nonprofit media outlets worldwide – Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks. They’re all also on the chopping block, apparently because they have accurately covered news, which means they haven’t always been overtly laudatory of Trump.
And, of course, Trump is trying to zero-out federal funding for public broadcasting in America – taking away the paltry $1.60 that is the average annual contribution of each American taxpayer to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. I guess I need to add another hat to my rotation – my WAMC cap, right?
Here’s the thing: If these assaults on truth-telling media succeed, some stories won’t be told, some people won’t hear the news, some truth will be obscured, some offenses against taxpayers’ interests will go unnoticed. More broadly, it will mean that we’ve lost the principle established at our nation’s founding – that free speech can thrive in America, and government can’t stifle it. We simply can’t tolerate that.
So that’s why I’m wearing my caps these days. Incidentally, they’re black caps, as I mentioned, these AP and VOA hats, and maybe that’s appropriate: In the world of cybersecurity, a “black hat” is a hacker. And I’d be happy to be identified as somebody who is hacking the world of the red cap folks – trying to disrupt the un-American attack on free speech.
Rex Smith, the co-host of The Media Project on WAMC, is the former editor of the Times Union of Albany and The Record in Troy. His weekly digital report, The Upstate American, is published by Substack.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.