Trump attack on press is 'biggest threat to democracy' says ex-Navy Seal chief

A retired Navy Seal who was an architect of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden has warned that Donald Trump’s attack on the press as an enemy of the American people “may be the greatest threat to democracy in my lifetime”.

Retired admiral William McRaven, the former commander of the Joint Special Operations Command and later the US Special Operations Command, issued his defense of the media during a Tuesday late-afternoon lecture to journalism students at the University of Texas, where he serves as chancellor.

McRaven, himself a journalism graduate of the school, referred to the press as “the single most important institution in this republic” and said: “This may be the most important time for journalism that I have seen in decades. Probably we need you now more than ever before.”

McRaven did not issue a personal criticism of Trump, nor a broader critique of his administration. But he directly referenced “the president” in objecting to Trump’s stated perspective on the US press.

“On February 17, the president said the news media is the enemy of the American people. The news media is the enemy of the American people,” McRaven said, according to a video of the speech the University of Texas made available to the Guardian.

“This sentiment may be the greatest threat to democracy in my lifetime, this sentiment,” McRaven said to applause.

“I will tell you, as journalism majors, as Americans, you should challenge that sentiment and that statement every opportunity you can. We must challenge this statement and this sentiment that the news media is the enemy of the American people.”

Escalating tensions with the media, Trump, who frequently refers to critical stories as “fake news”, tweeted on 17 February that the “FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!”

The tweet capped a week in which extensive reporting on Trump’s national security adviser, McRaven’s fellow JSOC veteran Mike Flynn, prompted Trump to fire Flynn for misleading Vice-President Mike Pence about conversations with the Russian ambassador concerning the easing of sanctions.

It also followed a lengthy, combative press conference in which Trump instructed a Jewish reporter to sit down and asked a black reporter if she would arrange a meeting with the Congressional Black Caucus.

Trump’s comment also appeared to take a darker view of journalism than his policy chief, Steve Bannon, a former chairman of the conservative Breitbart News website. Bannon has called the media – jokingly, in Breitbart’s view – the “opposition party”. Bannon earlier told the New York Times that the media “should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while”.

McRaven, who has largely stayed out of US politics since retiring from the navy in 2014, holds tremendous prestige in US defense circles.

In 2011, McRaven, then the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, helped design the Seal raid in Pakistan that killed Bin Laden. He oversaw it from a command post on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. The success of that mission, a milestone of the post-9/11 era, set McRaven up for his fourth star and leadership of the US Special Operations Command, the premier position in the elite special operations community.

McRaven noted that “the press has not always been kind to me”. Having traveled globally and dealt with media from many nations, he continued, “we have the finest press in the world, bar none. Bar none. And it is the single most important institution in this republic.”

McRaven encouraged journalists to “go to where the questions are” and “root out the answers. You really have to hold people accountable.” He recalled “some cases” where local journalists in Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq and elsewhere accurately reported civilian casualties from US actions that military commanders were confident they did not cause until they took the reporting seriously.

“We would not have gotten to where we needed to get to unless the media – and in this case, a stringer for a third or fourth world country, that did the investigative reporting well enough to get it into the news to hold me and others accountable. And I was incredibly appreciative of that, because as we began to look at that, we got better and better and we asked harder questions and we did everything humanly possible to ensure that we had no civilian casualties,” McRaven said.

Challenging the sentiment of a disloyal press, McRaven implored the students, “you have to get the facts right.” He recalled his old journalism professors being “all over me” if he turned in an insufficiently sourced article and warned students to “be careful about your bias”.

McRaven also warned about journalistic hubris, citing a speech by the Pulitzer prize-winning reporter Seymour Hersh claiming McRaven was part of an “executive assassination ring” reporting to then Vice-President Dick Cheney, “obviously, you know, the evil guy, Dick Cheney”. He recalled declining to respond, “because it is so bizarre that I will lend credence to it.

“But you wonder how we got to this point, where Seymour Hersh was writing about this executive assassination ring, and yet as military officers, the checks and balances on the missions we do would surprise a lot of people,” McRaven said.

McRaven, who declined further comment to the Guardian, gave his lecture on Tuesday – it was first reported in the UT student paper, the Daily Texan, and in the Austin American-Statesman.

A theme of McRaven’s lecture to the Moody College of Communication was how leaders must “spend your time and think about the importance of your words”.

“If you don’t think the words you say or the decisions you make have an impact not only on your people but on all the people you’ve affected, boy, then you are probably not the right person to be leading in your organization.”

After discussing public disbelief in reported facts during the question-and-answer period, an audience member asked McRaven: “What if your commander-in-chief doesn’t believe in the facts?”

McRaven said, “I’m not going to touch that,” prompting laughter. He continued: “But again, I think this is a function of reinforcing the facts, again, from the left and from the right.”