Embarrassing governments is the natural outcome of the press doing it's job. This is what the extra constitutional protections are for.
The US isn't special as a democracy and it's been pretty shoddy at quite a number of times, though now isn't necessarily the worst moment. The constitution is only strong on free speech and freedom of the press if people defend it.
Edit: It's especially notable that the degree that governments in the US are run as personal fief where officials lash out at anyone who inconveniences them (as is happening here), is strongly related to how far the government is from urban centers.
Chattel slavery, the Civil War, the Trail of Tears, the internment of Japanese Americans... need I go on? Anybody who thinks America might be in a worse state now than ever before needs a serious reality check.
The Constitution is exactly as strong as the people who don’t dismissively pretend it is self-enforcing.
I do believe the 2nd President successfully jailed journalists for this for years, leading to the Supreme Court deciding to you know, do something about it.
Things are only as strong as the political will believes they are strong. There was a period in the 1800s where the Supreme Court was ignored for example. The Supreme Court of the late 1700s did want to protect the 1st Amendment and they did win the political battle vs Adams. But under different circumstances, a different result could have very much happened.
It is only concerning if the threat is successful.
I hadn't realised the US had kept lèse-majesté when it broke with the UK (even in the UK, the last prosecution was in 1715, so this is particularly retro of his governorship...)
Reporters, please continue “embarrassing” all states. The sane leaders and citizens will be thanking you.
* gestures vaguely in the direction of Richard Nixon, waits for historians to chime in with earlier examples.
It’s frankly one of the planks of the shadow platform of the Trump Republican Party that journalists are enemies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_the_United_State...
Traditionally, that's the sort of rhetoric a leader uses when they're about to send out the hit squads.
Trump's method to reduce accountability was to nurture animosity specifically against journalism. Behind the scenes, his admin's revenge on whistleblowers carried on pretty much the same as his predecessors.
My long position is that US press coverage has been continually (but not exclusively) deferential to authoritarianism. We see that US coverage of unconstitutional executive domestic actions is often nonexistent, until whistleblowers drag news orgs into doing their jobs (Mark Klein's evidence of NSA+AT&T collusion wasn't enough to overcome the giant press yawn. Snowden's mountain of evidence was impossible to ignore.)
The US press is somewhat better at covering the misdeeds of R administrations than of D administrations (eg: US coverage of Holder's efforts to target journalists was muted, at best.) The difference is primarily a matter of competence. We've proven repeatedly that focusing on bias instead of ineptitude just leads to the 'view from nowhere'.
There's a case that Spiro (“nattering nabobs of negativism”) Agnew is a better Nixon-era example than Nixon himself, not that it started then, either.
Calling it a left/right issue just diverts from the real problem of government overreach and negative reaction to the exposure of malfeasance.
If you seriously think anti-press is a Trump phenomenon, I encourage you to look into the creation and use of the Alien and Sedition acts.
Or maybe how Lincoln treated press that was not acting as a propaganda arm of the Federal government.
If you want a more contemporary example, take a look at Obamas use of wiretapping against journalists and other attacks on press freedom.
When you treat this as a thing that only happens because of one "side", nothing is done to address the root cause.
Alternatively, arguments like that divert from the "real" problem that half of the political discourse of this country is predicated on an "anti-press" sentiment that allows political actors to lie at will.
Yes, there have been abuses against journalists throughout history. And because of that, it's possible to take a long view that "journalism" as a whole will win, given at least a little protection. Society will survive the occasional corrupt leader. It always has.
But the current climate where republicans can simply ignore reporting by mainstream outlets and cite their own alternative media instead is somewhat unique, historically. Something like two thirds of republican voters simply... don't believe in the results of a recent election, because their thought leaders won't tell them straight what the results were. This seems like rather a more pressing threat to democracy.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/sep/27/senior-cia-off...
Also, sorry about Governor Hee Haw. We know he’s an embarrassment.
The freedom of the press is a right granted to all citizenry of the United States, not a specialized permission granted to an elite caste.
For example based on Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire it’s constitutional to prohibit “fighting words.” Which would mean some things are fine in print but you can’t say to someone’s face because they would provoke violence.
Whether state actors have a right to free speech is not, as I understand it, a settled matter of law.
Okay, well it's the outcome of literally every government of non-trivial size and duration.