OLDER readers may remember the Watergate scandal, which forced the resignation of President Nixon in 1973. It shaped an entire generation of media people, for whom “investigative journalist” became a title as prized as “influencer” might be today. Although Richard Nixon was forced out by a combination of political pressure and Supreme Court judgments, this could never have happened without the work of two tireless (and well-expensed) journalists on The Washington Post, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, later memorialised in a film. I sloppily wrote “immortalised” at first, but I think the term of their immortality is over now.
Watergate set in place the illusions about the strength of the US constitution and the attachment of its people to democracy, and it cemented the press into the foundations of that palace of dreams. It inspired a generation with the belief that there were facts out there to be found, and that, once they were found, they would inspire general outrage — and this outrage would demand justice, which it must ultimately get. The Trump presidencies have shown all that up for nonsense, and there is a story in the current Atlantic magazine that illustrates this beautifully.
Here is a fact: about 78,000 adults and 8300 children have been killed so far this year by the deliberate actions of a foreign government, and it is probable that hundreds of thousand more will die of the same cause. The babies, almost all among the poorest in the world, are dying at the caprice of the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, who shut down an American government programme, PEPFAR (the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief), which in January was providing HIV drugs to 220,000 people, without which they will die, as nearly 90,000 already have.
But where is the outrage?
Peter Wehner’s piece in the The Atlantic explores the extraordinary silence of the American Evangelical Churches, for whom PEPFAR had once been a self-evident good. Many of the people he asked would talk only anonymously. They could not speak out on what they saw as their Christian duty, for fear of reaction from many Christians in their pews and among their fellows in the denominations. One (anonymous) pastor said: “Any pastor who has ever ventured to speak out on a controversial ‘political’ issue, whether it’s a moral issue or not, knows that he will get tremendous, angry feedback from some of his people.”
Someone once involved in ministry, the pastor said, described the mindset this way: “The government shouldn’t be doing this. Even if PEPFAR is a great program and saves millions of lives, it’s not the role of the U.S. government to spend the money obtained from the forcible confiscation of citizens’ property for the benefit of non-Americans. Reduce taxes, highlight the issue, and encourage Americans to set up and charitably give to NGOs that perform the same function.”
I don’t think this is more selfish than the secular British indifference to cuts in foreign aid: it is just more elaborately rationalised. It does contrast, though, with the immediate fierce pushback when one of the Evangelical charities working with PEPFAR announced that it was willing to hire Christians in same-sex marriages. It lost 3000 sponsors for children in the two days that it took to reverse the decision. So, the Evangelical community is capable of being stirred to outrage and action, just not by the suffering of the innocent.
What is a journalist to do in such a world? What use is a fact, when the world is determined to ignore it? Most of the collapse of power and prestige in journalism since the days of Watergate stems from the economic devastation that the internet has wrought. Some is due to a general decline in levels of literacy. But the political and cultural landslip that has tumbled so much of American Protestantism into rubble is also part of the story.
In fact, the greatest damage that any journalists have done to Donald Trump has come from lying: his media outriders have for years promoted the belief that somewhere in the Epstein files is the proof that leading Democrats are paedophiles. This lie is devoutly believed by the MAGA movement. But President Trump has now announced that the Epstein files were, all along, a hoax, promoted by his enemies. This has caused the MAGA movement far more outrage and disillusionment with their leader than the death of 90,000 real innocents could ever do. The obvious explanation is that President Trump himself knew all about Epstein’s predilections. But that, for true believers, is literally incredible.
