Islanders Write, an annual celebration of the Vineyard’s creative community put on by The Martha’s Vineyard Times that welcomes authors, journalists, and academics from around the country, kicked off Sunday night at Featherstone Center for the Arts.
A panel called “Politics and the Press, Censorship and Coverage,” which included Mara Liasson, E.J. Dionne Jr., and Patricia J. Williams and was moderated by The Times’ publisher Charles Sennott, opened the two-day event.
The panel discussed whether or not the government is censoring journalists and institutions, how journalists and academics work in an era of censorship, and what comparisons can be drawn between today and George Orwell’s 1984 novel.
Williams, who is an Island summer resident and a professor of law and humanities at Northeastern as well as Professor Emerita at Columbia University School of Law, said censorship is when the government “stills or chills speech.”
“I don’t know what else this is, when you’re making laws that say you can’t talk about certain things, where you have executive orders that say, for example, an entire subject area like critical race theory, misdefined as hating white people, . . . must be eliminated,” Williams said. She added that the intervention of the Department of Education in academia, such as disciplinary threats should a faculty member use a word not part of the permitted range of vocabulary, is censorship. (Williams, who teaches the law of war, said she’s not allowed to use the word “genocide” in her lessons.)
Liasson, national political correspondent for NPR, spoke to the journalism industry and said that funding cuts in public radio, such as at PBS, are both a form of government censorship and part of the age-old political struggle that goes back to the Nixon era.
“There’s no doubt that that fits into this much larger effort to dominate and diminish any institution that is a fact-based, reality-based institution, which is new journalism, which is newspapers, which is law firms, universities,” she said. “If you want to call all of that censorship, okay. But for us, I think it’s even simpler.”
Coverage of politics at NPR, which is less reliant on federal funds than PBS, hasn’t changed since Trump came into office, Liasson said. She’s received no orders to soften coverage of President Donald Trump from higher-ups. However, small stations, often in red, rural states, that use money from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (which recently announced a shutdown after $1.1 billion in federal cuts) to buy NPR programs, face closures.
Sennott reiterated Liasson’s point about the impact on rural communities. Rural towns and counties, he said, have long relied on public radio and local newspapers, which are disappearing; when there is a news desert, voter participation plummets, polarization surges, and bond ratings decline because banks don’t want to invest in communities where there’s no oversight.
An average of about 2.5 newspapers already die in America every week, and 60 percent of journalism jobs have evaporated in the last 20 years, Sennott said. “This is a gutting of an industry. This is a crisis as serious as the collapse of steel, coal –– but, I would argue, much more profoundly important to our democracy than steel or coal.”
Dionne, professor at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and syndicated columnist for the Washington Post, quoted Orwell in his thoughts on how the corruption of language can lead to the corruption of politics and vice versa.
“A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks,” Orwell wrote. In that essay, Dionne said, Orwell goes through a list of language authoritarians and dictators use to disguise the truth.
Though Dionne doesn’t think defunding NPR — which he said is a profoundly balanced network — is explicit censorship, he said that asserting balanced and fair-minded reporting is actually liberal is “an attempt to alter everyone’s perceptions about what is going on.” He added that the war on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs is an attack not on offensive words but on politically inconvenient words.
This form of political correctness is changing history, Dionne said, referencing when Enola Gay, the aircraft that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, was flagged for deletion as the Defense Department worked to remove content on DEI. He also noted the recent White House order of a Smithsonian museums and exhibitions review to guarantee content matches President Donald Trump’s interpretation of American history.
“I can make a whole speech about how the greatest thing about the United States is our capacity for self-correction and the progress we’ve made from the origins of ourselves,” he said. “But we have a lot in our history that we need to grapple with, and we can’t blow all that up, whether you call it censorship or distortion. I think it’s very dangerous, and it’s very bad for democracy.”
Panelists also discussed the phrases “fake news” and “enemy of the people,” which Sennott said come from Nazi Germany, and how journalists and academics navigate the present and not propagate further partisanship.
When Trump uses those phrases, Liasson said, journalists must explain why he uses that language, which she said is to control the narrative.
“If we’re going to have a civil debate that’s going to come up with solutions to problems, we have to start with a shared set of facts and then work our way to different opinions, not the other way around,” she said.
Liasson used an example from Trump’s first presidential run, when he said he’d like to punch a protester at his rally in the face. “Is it my job as an objective journalist to go interview an expert who is pro–punching protesters and then an expert anti–punching protestors? That’s ridiculous. That’s a parody of an objective journalist. There are certain things that are fundamental to a democracy, like not fomenting violence, and when one norm after another is broken, you’ve got to point that out.”
Dionne, who exercises more freedom as an opinion columnist, said he thinks there should be less worry around partisanship, because any criticism of Donald Trump is going to be condemned as partisan. The solution is rather to understand the other side, he said. He noted that after his hometown of Fall River voted Republican after a century of the opposite, he reported on the ground to understand what happened.
“I learned that there was a deep sense of economic unease, unhappiness, anger at the long-term economic decline in my hometown,” he said. “And I obviously was of the view that voting for Donald Trump was not the way to solve that problem, but I wanted to understand why this anger was out there.”
The panelists also answered questions from the audience that ranged from student safety on campus to self-censorship by journalists, which can include resignations and demoralization in the industry.
Richard North Patterson, lawyer, author, and political commentator, was slated to be a panelist but, unfortunately, couldn’t join because of illness.
Islanders Write carried into Monday with a long list of panels and workshops.
Sooo wonderful though I wish Patricia J Williams was pictured with the panel, as there were three people, not just two.