Is Empowering Authoritarians the Knight Foundation’s New Mission?

How a leading journalism philanthropy is continuing to drop the ball

The most important statement Donald Trump ever made to a journalist was a truthful one. That was when he told CBS 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl, back in July 2016, when he was just a candidate and not yet president, why he spent so much time attacking the media. According to Stahl, “He said, ‘You know why I do it? I do it to discredit you all and demean you all so when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you.’”

Once you undermine public trust in the free press, all kinds of lies become easy to tell and sustain. That’s the central problem with authoritarians who seek power and wield it corruptly for their own benefit. They aren’t playing the game of democracy in good faith; they are using the very openness of the democratic system to break it at its core.

Last week’s live encounter between Fox News’ Tucker Carlson and Ben Smith, the cofounder of a new global news site called Semafor, demonstrated Trump’s modus operandi in action, showing what happens when a reporter trying to operate in good faith attempts to interview an authoritarian. (To catch up, here are my two previous posts about the event, the first asking why the Knight Foundation was…