On Monday, the interview show Amanpour & Co., which airs on CNN International and taxpayer-supported PBS, aired a conversation between host Christiane Amanpour and Jelani Cobb, the dean of Columbia Journalism School, both fretting over the perils of Trump and bringing the Joe McCarthy era into the discussion (you know it's serious when journalists bring up the Red Scare).
The show included this laugher of a line fromAmanpour: "And yet, most journalists, most -- I guess, mainstream media would say, it's not our job to tell people how to vote."
Could have fooled us!
Cobb agreed in “yes, but” fashion, insisting journalists must make the “Joseph McCarthy” level dangers of a second Trump administration clear. Interestingly, Trump’s name was barely mentioned, as if he was Voldemort, but it was clear who Amanpour and Cobb were fretting over.
Last year, Cobb awarded Amanpour the Columbia Journalism Award at the school's graduation ceremony, and she made a fiery liberal speech in which she also suggested the media treat Trump like McCarthy. Cobb and Amanpour are clearly like-minded liberals, “mainstream” or not
Cobb: I don't think that we have to be in the business of telling people how to vote. But at the same time, we really should be in the business of pointing out things that are exceedingly dangerous. You know, we don't tell you what to wear in the morning, but we do tell you that it's going to rain. And so, you know, these are the things that we have to, really seriously, foreground in our work. And we've seen some of it, the eight years since this threat emerged, but I still don't think we're necessarily where we should be as an industry and as a profession.
That “threat” of course, was a five-letter word that starts with T. Amanpour suggested the press treat Trump like McCarthy and ignore him:
Amanpour: Are there historic examples that you teach at the Journalism School or that we should be aware of? I mean, I remember reading, and I'm just going to get this a little fuzzy, but I think it was one of the main national newspapers back at the height of McCarthy's lies, basically.
Cobb: That's right.
Amanpour: And his Red Scares and his blacklists and destroying the lives of people. They decided that they would not any longer print stuff that did not, what, reach the level that could be defended in a court, right?
Cobb: And so, here's the amazing thing about this, the parallels with the Joe McCarthy era and in American history are astounding. One of the things that began to happen as a result, and McCarthy would say outrageous things and newspapers would just print them or put them on the headlines, they had a built-in conflict of interest because if you said something outrageous, you knew that people were going to pick up the paper and buy it….
Switching to the campus protests at Columbia, Cobb surprisingly admitted there were “some people who were legitimately dangerous who found their way onto campus.” Yet, the dean of the journalism school found no threatening left-wingers, even though protesters forcefully occupied a campus building and at least one student protest leader was banned from campus for threatening to murder “Zionists.” He was talking about “far-right” Proud Boys as the true threat. Some journalism!
Cobb: Well, some far-right groups, actually, who were Proud Boys and they were kind of a presence there. And so those were things that complicated the scenario. But for us, we err on the side of free speech and free press at every turn.
Amanpour dropped a stunning bit of news – those pro-Hamas contingents at Columbia and elsewhere, harassing Jews and taking the side of terrorists, were actually “pro-peace”:
What do you think the lasting fallout will be? Because it really was an upheaval on American campuses and in this -- the domain of free speech versus hate speech, or intimidating speech, or even acts of violence. Because I read that UCLA, which called in the police to stop, actually, a pro-Israel group attacking the pro-peace group.
https://newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/clay-waters/2024/06/01/amanpour-guest-compare-trump-joe-mccarthy-were-hamas-rallies-pro
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