These photos of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin ran in the Chicago Tribune (12/22/15) under the headline, “Two of a Kind: Trump and ‘Pootie-Poot.’”
Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page (12/22/15) is understandably put off by Donald Trump’s seemingly nonchalant attitude about journalists being murdered.
Told by MSNBC‘s Joe Scarborough that Russian President Vladimir Putin, who had exchanged compliments with Trump, “kills journalists, political opponents and invades countries,” the Republican frontrunner responded:
Well, I think that our country does plenty of killing, also, Joe…. There’s a lot of stupidity going on in the world right now, Joe. A lot of killing going on, a lot of stupidity and that’s the way it is.
Page comments on Trump’s remarks:
Trump not only sounds remarkably unconcerned about the rise of possibly state-sanctioned murder of journalists and activists in Russia but he also suggests that the US government is engaged in morally equivalent activities.
In a column devoted to criticizing a lack of moral outrage, it’s noteworthy that Page doesn’t refer again in the column to invading countries—something that both the US and Russia certainly do, resulting in far more bloodshed than the killings of journalists and activists that Page focuses on. While he offers Trump’s suggestion of the US and Russia engaging in “morally equivalent activities” as a self-evident absurdity, the reality is that Putin has a long way to go before he racks up the death toll that the US inflicted in just one of its recent invasions: the war on Iraq, which resulted in approximately half a million deaths (PLoéS Medicine, 10/15/13).
But to follow Page’s lead and focus on the killing of journalists: He offers the records of the Committee to Protect Journalists as evidence that “while critics have been hard-pressed to prove Putin ordered killings of journalists, he is widely believed to have allowed an atmosphere of impunity toward those who do kill journalists.” CPJ’s website, he notes, has “profiles of 36 journalists who have been killed in Russia since 1992, either while doing their work or in direct reprisal for doing it.”
Actually, CPJ breaks down the murders by year, so you can see that 23 journalists have been killed since 1999, when Putin became the Russian leader. Over the same time period, CPJ notes five journalists killed in the US—suggesting that the US is indeed a safer place to practice journalism than Russia.
But there are killings of journalists by the US that aren’t counted in these tallies. In 2006, CPJ put out a list of 15 media workers killed by US forces in Iraq. The Pentagon dismissed these deaths as regrettable accidents, but there’s suspicion in at least some of these cases that reporters were targeted by the US military for doing their jobs. Regarding lethal airstrikes against Al Jazeera‘s Baghdad offices and a deadly military assault on journalists in the city’s Palestine Hotel, for example, Reporters Without Borders declared (4/8/03), “We can only conclude that the US Army deliberately and without warning targeted journalists.” (See “Is Killing Part of Pentagon Press Policy?” FAIR Press Release, 4/10/03.)
Sometimes attacks on journalists by US forces are openly acknowledged. During the Kosovo War, the US military targeted and destroyed the offices of Radio/Television Serbia, killing 16 media workers. CPJ refused to include these casualties in its annual list of attacks on the press, saying that RTS fell “outside our extremely broad definition of journalism.”
It’s not uncommon for prominent US political commentators to advocate war crimes against civilians; one could cite Thomas Friedman, Bill O’Reilly, Ted Koppel and Paul Harvey, to name a few. But CPJ would never say that such bloodthirsty comments—which are far worse than anything attributed to RTS during the Kosovo War—put these pundits outside its “broad definition of journalism” and thereby made them legitimate targets for violence. (See “FAIR to CPJ on RTS Bombing,” 8/2/00.) Clearly there are different rules for journalists who advocate that your country’s military attack civilians and for journalists attacked by your country’s military.
Page rightly scorns “Putin’s casually dismissive attitude toward murdered journalists.” But how much has Page–as he discloses, a board member of CPJ–spoken out about CPJ’s dismissal of media workers deliberately killed by his own government? It’s easy to get outraged by the crimes of official enemies, and to forget or to justify the crimes of the state you identify with. What really sets Trump apart is that he seems lackadaisical about both types of crimes.
Jim Naureckas is the editor of FAIR.org.
Letters can be sent to the Chicago Tribune at ctc-tribletter@tribune.com (or via Twitter: @ChicagoTribune). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.
Source: Fair.org No Spin Section
 under the headline, “Two of a Kind: Trump and ‘Pootie-Poot.’” Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page (12/22/15)…){kind=link}