OPINION: We can do without 'alternative facts'

ALECIA ROUSSEAU

We should be thankful we live in a country where our foremost politicians show more interest in the issues of the country than their egos.

The contrast with the new situation in the United States could not be more stark.

I fully realise we have politicians not immune to self-serving attention-grabbing tactics, but overall our politicians are saints compared to Donald Trump and his sidekicks.

Prime Minister Bill English and opposition leader, Labour's Andrew Little, will never be huge winners in popularity polls with their understated styles but that's not a bad thing.

The populist tactics which helped propel Trump from businessman/reality TV star to president of the United States have driven deep wedges in America and the divisions are only likely to get a lot worse. He has been in power less than a week and former president Barack Obama's assessment during the presidential campaigning is still hard to argue with -- Trump is fundamentally unqualified and unprepared for the job.

He has spent most of the past week attacking media over their reporting of the size of his inauguration crowd -- obviously to Trump, size always matters. The new White House press secretary Sean Spicer even went in to bat over the issue, blatantly lying on several points and then refusing to take questions from reporters.

Regardless of what people think of some journalists and media outlets, this is not the type of nonsense we would want to see in this country.

Then the new president used a meeting with the CIA as an opportunity to again whinge about the reporting of his inauguration and try to rewrite his opinion of the intelligence agency. Having criticised the agency repeatedly in the past month, suddenly "no-one" supported the intelligence services more than Donald Trump. Really?

Thankfully even the most brazen of our politicians (you know who I mean) wouldn't try such a U-turn as they know our media would nail them on it, with the majority of the public in full approval.

It's not hard to see the mindset behind the Trump team ... basically, wear down the media with a steady flood of "alternative facts" until many of those reporters start going along with the huff and bluff purely to get access to the president and his camp.

Then you reach a stage when the public, both in America and abroad, will not know what to believe. That's a frightening prospect, and not something we want to see here.

However, despite what Donald J Trump (which by the way in Welsh means fart -- that's a fact) would have the world believe, there are still plenty of highly competent, and honest, journalists around the world who will be doing their best to ensure the truth still gets out. None of them are perfect, but it needs to be remembered the work of reporters faces more scrutiny than perhaps any other profession.

We have a number of great journalists in this country, with our leading newspapers the Herald and Dominion, along with our main TV networks boasting excellent reporting pools.

Outgoing president Obama summed up the value of quality journalism well when saying farewell to the press corp at his final White House news conference. "You're not supposed to be complimentary but you are supposed to cast a critical eye over folks who hold enormous power and make sure we are accountable to the people who sent us here."

This is an opinion piece written by chief reporter Alecia Rousseau.