Trump brings a new edge to Reagan's 'South Succotash'
After Trump's speech, in which he laced into prominent Democrats, the nonpartisan VFW issued something else that differentiated him from Reagan: an apology. "We were disappointed to hear some of our members boo the press," VFW spokeswoman Randi Law said in a statement. "We rely on the media to help spread the VFW's message, and CNN, NBC, ABC, FOX, CBS, and others on site today, were our invited guests. We were happy to have them there."
Thank you, fellow veterans. As a Vietnam-era Army draftee, I was as disappointed to hear the VFW crowd's booing along with the president as I was by the booing that similarly broke out when Trump attacked his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton and then-President Barack Obama in his speech to the National Boy Scout Jamboree last year. Some things should stay above partisan politics.
"Have those veterans who booed and taunted the media in response to Trump's cue forgotten that some members of the press corps are combat veterans?" wrote Martha Raddatz, chief global affairs correspondent at ABC News in a Washington Post op-ed.
"We shared foxholes," read the headline in print editions of the piece, "Now they boo us."
She described her decades of working alongside American soldiers in the Middle East and the trusting bond between reporters and the press. She cited journalists who have given their lives while reporting from war zones and others whose reporting of the treatment of wounded veterans resulted in improvements by the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Unfortunately that public service side of journalism is not what people always see, especially in coverage that runs up against their own political positions. Trump, new to politics but a master of media messaging, knows that the old warning against making an enemy of someone who buys ink by the barrel has gone out of style in the digital age. Almost.
Trump all but gave the game away by declaring, "What you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening." Both news media and news consumers need to be aware of the polarizing impact that competing versions of reality can have on our democracy. Otherwise we risk devolving into the divided society that our real enemies want us to be.
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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)
(c) 2018 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
