Since the founding of the Republic, elected officials have attempted to manipulate them to further their own political aims by confabulating, distorting or concealing information.

However, deliberately casting false information as a lure and then accusing journalists of purveying “fake” news when they bite — a practice Governor LePage proudly admitted earlier this month — represents a new nadir of disrespect for a pillar of democracy.

I refer to LePage’s notorious July 6th comments during a radio talk show about press reports that he was planning to take an out-of- state 10-day vacation during the expected shutdown of State government due to a legislative impasse over passage of a new budget. If true, the story would have portrayed the governor as insensitive to the plight of Maine’s people and public employees.

LePage did not, in fact, depart Maine, but he did leave voicemail messages for two Republican State Senate leaders the day before the July 4 th holiday, unequivocally saying he was going. When word about his vacation plans appeared in Twitter reports and prompted questions from the press, however, one of the governor’s spokespersons labeled the information as “100 percent false” and another insisted “he will not be leaving.”

Three days after the Portland Press Herald published a piece about the reported vacation plans (which quoted the denials from the governor’s representatives), LePage gloated in a radio interview that the press “got taken line, hook and sinker.” The governor went on to excoriate the press as “vile and inaccurate.” He further admitted, “I just love to sit in my office and make up ways so they’ll write these stupid stories. I mean they are just so stupid it’s awful. … [T]he sooner the print press goes away, the better society will be.”

Prior to LePage’s comments, it was anyone’s guess as to whether his voicemails had merely been a tactic to pressure legislators to pass a budget or whether he had made and then changed his plans to avoid bad publicity. The actual explanation was worse than either scenario.

There has always been a natural tension between the press and elected politicians, one which usually proves healthy for democracy. A skilled and dogged reporter can uncover more truths in a week than half a dozen legislative investigative committees armed with subpoena powers in a year. Renown investigative journalists like I.F. Stone, David Halberstam, Bob Woodward and Seymour Hersh have not only been intrepid sleuths but brilliant scholars, whose dispatches can aptly be characterized as the “first rough drafts of history.” Their relentless digging exposed government misconduct and deception relating to the Vietnam War, Watergate, the 2003 Iraq invasion, and treatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib Prison, among other scandals.

In autocratic regimes, typified by Russia and China, journalists who don’t toe the party line usually suffer loss of employment, harassment, imprisonment or even assassination. Those suppressive tools are not available in the U.S., where freedom of the press is constitutionally protected, so politicians instead deploy stealthy methods to discredit reporters or their reportage.

Deliberately leaking misinformation, stonewalling, threating libel suits, accusing reporters of bias, favoring friendly media outlets and shutting out unfriendly ones are among the most common techniques. President Donald Trump has ramped up anti-media attacks, repeatedly taking to Twitter to blast mainstream print and broadcast stories about him as “fake news.

Governor LePage, who harbors the delusion that he alone speaks for the people of Maine and that any unflattering news story about him is, therefore, “vile and inaccurate,” is using similar tactics. However, he has out-trumped Trump by boasting about his successful efforts to mislead the press.

LePage’s approach to journalists, like his approach to anyone who speaks critically of him, is akin to that of an aggressive bull elephant during mating season. If he’d tone down the aggression and take a page from history, he’d do us all a favor and help himself in the process.

The most popular modern U.S. presidents, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy, all had cordial relationships with the press and (with the possible exception of Ike) were adept at the give-and- take of interviews and news conferences. As a result, they gained the trust of the press and enjoyed largely favorable reporting, which, in turn, enhanced their public popularity and made it easier for them to win over voters and legislators.

President Richard Nixon, on the other hand, who loathed the press, used Spiro Agnew, his vice-president, as a hatchet man to attack journalists who wrote critically about the administration. When five burglars were caught red-handed breaking and entering Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex on June 17, 1972, therefore, editors and reporters at the Washington Post were willing to contemplate the unthinkable – that the burglars might have ties to the Committee to Re-elect the President (“CREEP”) and ultimately to the White House – and they launched an intense journalistic investigation that ended up with Nixon resigning in disgrace just over two years later.

No one should expect LePage, or any other elected official, to have a buddy-buddy relationship with journalists. Indeed, too cozy a relationship would compromise the objectivity we should expect of the press. However, the spiteful adversarial relationship that LePage fosters with the press is inappropriate, harmful to democracy, and, in the end, self-defeating.

Elliott Epstein is a trial lawyer with Andrucki & King in Lewiston. His Rearview Mirror column, which has appeared in the Sun Journal for 10 years, analyzes current events in an historical context. He is also the author of “Lucifer’s Child,” a book about the notorious 1984 child murder of Angela Palmer.