They say the “Fourth Estate” is an essential part of a well functioning democracy, or representative Republic, acting as a check on government corruption, a guarantor of transparency in the work of those meant to represent the people. But who keeps the journalists and media corporations accountable? No one elects the management of CNN or the NY Times. Journalists can’t be recalled or impeached. So what is the cost to us all when an outlet with a truly global reach and vaunted reputation actually edits the footage of the most powerful man in the world to represent him in a way that is 180 degrees the opposite of what he actually is and says?
This is not a theory nor is it unique to the US, as the President’s post this week about the British Broadcasting Corporation has made clear, this is an issue which has crescendoed and has inordinate national security consequences threatening democracy itself. I grew up in the UK, the child of refugees who fled a communist dictatorship. As such, the BBC, or “Auntie Beeb,” as the Brits endearingly called it then, was an institution that shaped my early life, as it did the media milieu for millions inside and outside the UK.
This strange state organ which is still funded by a universal and mandatory “TV licence fee,” was the media entity against which all broadcasters were measured, domestically and internationally. Not any more.
As the resignations of it’s Director-General Tim Davie, and the BBC News CEO Deborah Turness prove, it has become an ideological hive of anti-democratic propaganda.
When you splice two different parts of a presidential speech together that are actually 54 minutes apart, to give the impression that the incumbent head of state of the the most powerful nation in the world is engendering violence against members of Congress, you are not a providing a news service, you are peddling propaganda.
This is all the more shocking, as President Trump pointed out, when this is done from a nation we consider “our number one ally.”
The Panorama episode scandal isn’t just about journalistic turpitude, it is a matter of National Security. When what the President has righteously labelled the “FakeNews” portrays the leader of the Republic and his followers as Nazis, white supremacists, and a threat to democracy, how long before the gullible and unstable see violence as a justified response?
Innocent Americans like my late friend Charlie Kirk’s widow tragically bear the brunt of such reckless perversion of the truth.
But why should we be surprised when the BBC has been found to be lying multiple times a week about very serious issues such as Gaza, and never to the benefit of the nation that has been attacked, but strangely always to the benefit of the terrorists?
Those of us who have to find solutions to the jihadi threat the West faces have a reasonable expectation that “independent” journalists not act as media surrogates for those who slaughter innocents. Yet they do.
But the National Security professionals on both sides of the Atlantic will keep doing our job irrespective of Auntie Beeb’s peddlers of propaganda.
Sebastian Gorka is Deputy Assistant to President Trump and Senior Director for Counterterrorism in the National Security Council