Thursday’s Morning Joe took the time to devote a whole segment to a new Netflix documentary entitled Nobody Speak: Trials of the Free Press. In discussion with the director, Brian Knappenberger, the panel lamented the supposed deplorable attacks by Donald Trump and his supporters on the media and First Amendment. Time was taken to mourn the demise of the "critical" news site Gawker, dead at the hands of Hulk Hogan, and Trump supporter Peter Thiel. “This seems so important,” co-host Mika Brzezinski said reverently of the conversation, “I am beginning to feel like everything he [Trump] does...is far more serious than we could ever imagine.”
The segment started off with a clip from the documentary in which it warned that, “Without a meaningful application of the First Amendment you have a true risk of living in a suppressive state.” It further cautioned, “There is enough chance that the President will be upset enough, angry enough, vengeful enough to try to take whatever actions he thinks he can to punish those who have offended him.”
Much of the actual dialogue eventually came to revolve around the influence of powerful right-wing billionaires, such as Sheldon Adelson and Peter Thiel, on the news and their increasing power. As an example of this, they cited the lawsuit in which Hulk Hogan successfully sued Gawker Media for libel:
KNAPPENBERGER: In the film we kind of look at the chronology of what we've seen. If you look at candidate Trump and the way he treated the press, the press were scum, I think even this show got some heat at times from him, but the press were scum, you know, he blacklisted them from attending their rallies and speeches, giving press credentials in the usual way, eventually of course called them the enemy of the people and then, you know, we saw the antics when he was president -- President-Elect Trump and even now, I think as late as yesterday he was sort of still -- this is a part of his -- of every speech that he makes and it has been a part of his rise, this kind of anger of the press.
WILLIE GEIST: A lot of what you talk about in the film, though, predates Donald Trump and focuses on big, rich guys who can buy out media and then control the narrative their way. Shelly Adelson, Las Vegas, that secret deal, and Peter Thiel, behind the Gawker versus the Hulk Hogan deal. What is the danger of that big money being able to control the message a newspaper or organization puts out?
KNAPPENBERGER:Yeah. We should say that the film starts by looking at the Hulk Hogan versus Gawker case which I thought was fascinating by itself. The first time a sex tape case like this had ever gone to trial. And as salacious and tabloidy as that sounded there was clearly some big picture first amendment versus privacy issues at stake. It was complex, it was kind of on the fringes of acceptability.
But it was the verdict that was really kind of shocking but $140 million verdict paired with a $50 million requirement that Gawker had to put up the money right away. That was a death sentence of Gawker. Then it was revealed that Peter Thiel was actually funding Hulk Hogan's lawsuit. So there was an element of almost theater actually in the trial because you didn't understand what was really happening here was that there was a very wealthy individual trying to come silence this critical voice.
Completely absent from the segment was any semblance of discussion about the issue of liberal bias within the mainstream media. In addition to this, no questions were raised as to why the press has become so hated or why its credibility has fallen to all-time lows in the eyes of the American people. The narrative simply became one of the media being the victims of an unwarranted and unprovoked attack by Donald Trump and his supporters. Innocent victims, like Gawker, who never, ever, ever, did anything that warranted any sort of lawsuit or legal action, whatsoever.
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Here are the excerpts from the June 22 segment:
8:52 AM
NARRATOR: Without a meaningful application of the first amendment you have a true risk of living in a suppressive state, of living in a country in which a president thinks he's doing the right things -- they always do -- who thinks that his critics are harming the country -- they always do -- can limit the ability of the press, the willingness of the press to expose, to criticize, and the like. There is enough chance that the president will be upset enough, angry enough, vengeful enough to try to take whatever actions he thinks he can to punish those who have offended him.
MIKA BRZEZINSKI: That was a clip from the new Netflix original documentary, Nobody Speak: Trials of the Free Press, which looks at the growing influence that both billionaires and politicians are having on today's media. Joining us now is the film's director Brian Knappenberger. Brian, thank you for coming on the show. This seems so important. It feels like Trump's -- President Trump's sort of fight with the press often is sort of joked away. I am beginning to feel like everything that he does that people end up sort of joking about, because it's just him, is far more serious than we could ever imagine. What do you feel about this fight with the press?
KNAPPENBERGER: Yeah. I think it is serious.
BRZEZINSKI: What does this show?
KNAPPENBERGER: Very, very serious. In the film we kind of look at the chronology of what we've seen. If you look at candidate Trump and the way he treated the press, the press were scum, I think even this show got some heat at times from him, but the press were scum, you know, he blacklisted them from attending their rallies and speeches, giving press credentials in the usual way, eventually of course called them the enemy of the people and then, you know, we saw the antics when he was President -- President-Elect Trump and even now, I think as late as yesterday he was sort of still -- this is a part of his -- of every speech that he makes and it has been a part of his rise, this kind of anger of the press.
WILLIE GEIST: A lot of what you talk about in the film, though, predates Donald Trump, actually, and focuses on big, rich guys who can buy out media and then control the narrative that way. Shelly Adelson, Las Vegas, that secret deal, and Peter Thiel, behind the Gawker versus Hulk Hogan deal. What is the danger of that big money being able to control the message a newspaper or organization puts out?
KNAPPENBERGER:Yeah. We should say that the film starts looking at the Hulk Hogan versus Gawker case which I thought was jsut fascinating by itself. The first time a sex tape case like this had ever gone to trial. And as salacious and tabloidy as that sounded there was clearly some big picture first amendment versus privacy issues at stake. It was complex, it was kind of on the fringes of acceptability.
But it was the verdict that was really kind of shocking it was $140 million verdict paired with a $50 million requirement that Gawker had to put up the money right away. That was a death sentence of Gawker and then it was revealed that Peter Thiel was actually funding Hulk Hogan's lawsuit. So there was an element of almost theater, actually, in the trial because you didn't understand what was really happening here was that there was a very wealthy individual trying to come silence this critical voice.
BRZEZINSKI: You mentioned Peter Thiel. Here's another clip from Nobody Speak.
TRUMP: I think the media is among the most dishonest groups of people I've ever met.
NARRATOR: Donald Trump, Peter Thiel and other billionaires have been trying to undercut the press, undercut the First Amendment, undercut the freedom of speech.
NARRATOR: I think the common thread among the Peter Thiel story, the Adelson story, and the Trump story is billionaires who are proclaiming we are not vulnerable to truth. We are invulnerable to the facts. And it simply doesn't matter what you say, what the press does, we are more powerful than the truth.
MIKE BARNICLE: Okay, there you have sort of the nut, the core of the problem. You have resources married to intent. You have rich people with the specific intent of damaging the free press. Now, it's not going to work with The Times or The Washington Post or NBC, but there are a host of medium-sized papers and websites around this country that could be ended with this.
KNAPPENBERGER: Yeah, and that's -- I was actually very concerned about that. Local communities across the United States used to have a very healthy kind of competitive multiple newspapers. And so this Sheldon Adelson story where he buys the Las Vegas Journal, an important local newspaper in the west, he does that in secret so you don't know what his intentions are, you don't know what his motivation is. So, that was a big part oft hat. But, if you look at the bigger picture, I do think we're facing a wave of hostility towards the press.
If you think about what we've seen just in the last couple of months, you know, had a reporter arrested for asking Tom Price a question, health and human services director. You had a reporter pinned, I guess, against the wall of the FCC for asking a question of the director there. And of course you had this awful incident with Greg Gianforte, body slamming a reporter for asking a question, doing what he should be doing, asking a question about health care of the then congressional candidate, now a member of Congress.
SAM STEIN: I'm curious how you would react to my theory, which is that part of the problem, actually, rests with the press corps itself. The press has a collective action issue. As a member of an outlet that was barred from covering the Trump campaign, I experienced this first hand, which is when people, outlets are barred from covering the campaign, the rest of the press corps could take two tracks, one is just to sort of go on with their business and cover the campaign as they see fit, and the other is to stand in solidarity with the other outlets that are being barred.
And this is happening now with the White House briefings where they're increasingly off camera, no audio, no video, and what challenge the White House Correspondents Association now has is what do you do? Do you try to go on with business as usual or do you try to do collective action? No longer broadcast some of these executive signing statements, no longer attend these background briefings that you can't even broadcast or show audio files for? So is that the solution? Is the solution to all this pressure and the tax and the money collective action?
KNAPPENBERGER: Yeah, actually, I think so. In history there's been some great examples of that where somebody's been, you know, shut down a question and someone else has just deferred their question to the person who was just shut down. Those are pretty moving statements by themselves. And I think that can easily be something important. You know, the small sort of ray of hope that I have in this and the sort of early days of the Trump administration is that the press is kind of getting reminded about what they're there for in the first place. I do think there's a lot of legitimate criticism of the press, that maybe it's gotten too cozy to power, that maybe its become too corporatized over time or traded softball stories for access --
BRZEZINSKI: And Twitter hasn't helped. You have the whole concept of objectivity I think is in peril. And there's a transformation taking place from objective reporters to transparent reporters. Which I think is a good thing, but I think it runs into some potholes along the way, especially at times like this.
KNAPPENBERGER: Yeah.
