A Review of:

THE PRESIDENTS VS. THE PRESS
The Endless Battle Between the White House and the Media — From the Founding Fathers to Fake News
By Harold Holzer

The next time President Trump chafes your free-speech sensibilities by yanking the White House credentials of a reporter who questioned him hard, insulting journalists at a news conference, tweeting about “fake news” being the enemy of the people or threatening to retaliate against one of the media outlets whose reporting has offended him, calm yourself by opening Harold Holzer’s “The Presidents vs. the Press” to almost any page. For all of Trump’s transgressions against the press — and they are many — Holzer’s book offers evidence that he’s not the greatest enemy of the First Amendment to have occupied the White House. He might not even rank in the top five.

Trump would definitely have to bow to both President John Adams, who signed into law sedition statutes used to prosecute journalists, and President Abraham Lincoln, who imprisoned scores of editors during the Civil War, purged news stories from the telegraph, banned some newspapers from the mails and even confiscated presses. “Altogether, nearly 200 papers would face federally initiated subjugation during the Civil War,” Holzer writes. President Theodore Roosevelt, who actually enjoyed reporters, punished the press with a lighter touch. He established the “Ananias Club” — a symbolic place of exile — for reporters who displeased him, and he filed a libel suit against Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World. President Woodrow Wilson reprised some of Lincoln’s worst tendencies during World War I, imposing censorship of the press and pushing propaganda. And when it comes to President Richard Nixon, a man who once told his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, “The press is…”

Read more at:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/25/books/review/the-presidents-vs-the-press-harold-holzer.html