The pen may not be mightier than the sword, but it still has the power to wound. How else to explain the extraordinary remarks of the former Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, this week in which he revealed how stung he’d been by an editorial in the Times?
You’d think Russia’s elite had enough problems on their hands at the moment. Roaring inflation and interest rates. Sanctions. Labour shortages. The spiralling cost of war. The mounting casualties in Ukraine. But, no, it was an editorial penned by an unknown hand in London that really got under the skin of Putin’s close ally, who now serves as deputy chairman of Russia’s security council.
Perhaps Medvedev didn’t get through the entire leader column, but just glanced at the headline, which was in response to the assassination of Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov on the streets of Moscow. It read: “The targeted killing is a legitimate act of defence by a threatened nation.”
Whatever, it sent him into a spasm of rage, describing the editors of the Times as “legitimate military targets.” The anonymous editorial team at the Times were “miserable jackals who cowardly hid behind their editorial. That means the entire leadership of the publication.”
Drawing himself up to his full 5 feet 6 inches he warned them: “So be careful. After all, a lot of things happen in London.”
Indeed, they do. In 2017 Buzzfeed, then a muscular investigative website, probed no fewer than 14 suspicious Russian-related deaths in which assorted critics of the state variously dropped dead from “heart attacks” or “suicide”. Others fell out of windows or suffered from malfunctioning helicopters. Poisoning and strangling were other options, while we may never know the truth of the man who died inside a red sports bag that had been padlocked from the outside.
So, yes, a lot of “things” happen in London and no doubt the senior management of the Times are taking the best security advice as to how seriously they should take the scarcely veiled threat from the man who served as Russia’s president between 2008 and 2012.
In this, Medvedev has something in common with Adolf Hitler, who was similarly obsessed with the British press. The cartoonist David Low, who regularly lampooned the dictator, was asked by the then foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, to go easy on Hitler in 1937 because it was upsetting the little fellow. The suggestion came from Dr Goebbels.
Threatening to knock off British journalists for writing upsetting things is novel, but it is hardly breaking news that Russia’s leaders have never been in love with the notion of a free press. What is news is that America—once a shining beacon of a noisy, messy and troublesome fourth estate—is inching towards the same view of journalism.
Granted, Donald Trump and his allies have not directly suggested that American journalists should be topped. But he has frequently insulted, attacked or threatened the press in assorted public addresses. That has included apparently welcoming the idea of journalists being shot; praising physical aggression towards reporters (“it’s actually a beautiful sight”); and joking that the prospect of prison rape would encourage journalists to shop their sources.
We have come a long way from Thomas Jefferson’s preference for “newspapers without government” over “government without newspapers”. So far, in fact, that Trump’s pick to head the FBI, Kash Patel, has explicitly warned: “We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections. We’re going to come after you, whether it’s criminally or civilly.”
That quote came from an interview with Trump’s former henchman, Steve Bannon, who appears to be back in favour and who has been making similarly menacing noises about the incoming administration’s intentions towards the media.
At a recent gala dinner for conservatives on Wall Street in New York Bannon threatened: “We want retribution and we’re going to get retribution. You have to. It’s not personal, it’s not personal,” Bannon told a cheering audience. “They need to learn what populist, nationalist power is on the receiving end.
“I need investigations, trials and then incarceration. And I’m just talking about the media. Should the media be included in the vast criminal conspiracy against President Trump?” He named checked liberal commentators and broadcasters “Andrew Weissmann on MSNBC and Rachel Maddow and all of them.”
Bannon gave some clue as to what could lie ahead for “unfriendly” American media when he announced: “We want all your emails, all your text messages, everything you did.”
If the idea is to get the American media worried it seems to be working, despite Yale professor Timothy Snyder’s memorable exhortation: “Do not obey in advance.” Newspapers have fallen silent rather than upset Trumpy by not endorsing his presidency. The owner of one of them, the LA Times, has devised a ludicrous AI “bias meter” to warn sensitive readers about the possible political leanings of its columnists.
In the past week we’ve seen ABC News agreeing to pay $15m towards Donald Trump’s presidential library to settle a libel lawsuit over its anchor George Stephanopoulos’s assertion that the president-elect had been found civilly liable for raping writer E Jean Carroll. In fact he was found liable of sexually assaulting and defaming her.
In the past any broadcaster would have fought such a case on the assumption that the US First Amendment, along with other laws protecting free speech, would have protected them. But with a Supreme Court packed with Trump acolytes it would take a brave news organisation to test the historic guarantees of free speech.
Not content with humbling ABC, Trump has now announced he is suing the Des Moines Register newspaper, along with its parent company and its former pollster for “brazen election interference” over what turned out to be a rogue poll suggesting Kamala Harris might win Iowa, published days before the election.
Legal experts now predict that the 1917 Espionage Act—weaponised against Julian Assange by former Trump Attorney General Bill Barr—will now be deployed in the manner Bannon suggested, to get at all reporters’ communications and sources.
The Act prohibits the sharing or unauthorised retention of “information relation to the national defense.” It seems likely that Trump will argue that practically all presidential communications qualify as national defence information. So the White House press corps could face prosecution for reporting on what Trump and his team are up to.
Medvedev’s threats to target Times journalists in London represent something new and ugly, even if we are wearily used to the Russian state inflicting violence on anyone it deems to be an enemy.
But what is unrolling in America at the moment is equally alarming, if only because it threatens to unravel a deeply ingrained idea of what a free press was and should be. Watch this space for who will bend the knee and who will resist.
