Too Late Smart

I think that Maureen Dowd is shutting the barn door after the horses have already run out in her New York Times column expressing concern that journalists increasingly see themselves as partisan operatives rather than impartial reporters of the facts:

When I went to the Vanity Fair Oscar party with A.G. Sulzberger in 2017, movie stars rushed up to thank him for fighting President Trump. Over and over again, he explained that it was not the mission of The New York Times to be part of the resistance. Rather, he said, the paper would be straight and combat lies with the truth.

As the Trump years went on and the outrages piled up, with the renegade president making it clear that he would not be bound by decency or legality, the left declared it a national emergency and acted as though all journalistic objectivity should be suspended. Some thought that the media should ignore Trump’s news conferences and tweets and that the only legitimate interview with Trump was one where you stabbed him in the eye with a salad fork.

Many reporters offered sharp opinions, the kind not seen before in covering a president. The tango between Trump and the media — his most passionate relationship — was as poisonous as it was profitable. For reporters, who hadn’t been this chic since Ben Bradlee battled Richard Nixon, fat cable, book and movie contracts flooded in. CNN was on “Breaking News” for four years straight, thanks to Trump’s dark genius at topping himself with outlandish narratives.

Lines were blurred that would inevitably need to snap back when normality was restored.

Some of the new assertiveness was good and should continue. After many years when I had to comb the thesaurus to find a synonym for “liar” to use about Dick Cheney, The Times finally allowed us to call high-ranking politicians who lied, liars. Thank you, Donald Trump!

But the press, bathed in constant adulation and better remuneration, will have a tough adjustment. A whole generation of journalists was reared in the caldera that was Trump’s briefing room.

I think she’s missing a lot. For one thing it didn’t start with Trump. It goes back at least 90 years, to Franklin Roosevelt’s first term. Nixon received much closer scrutiny that Jack Kennedy or Lyndon Johnson. Reagan receive closer scrutiny than Carter. George W. Bush and Donald Trump received closer scrutiny than either Bill Clinton or Barack Obama.

Look, I think that Donald Trump is a shmuck, unworthy to be president, but, unlike many Democrats to this day, I think he won the 2016 election fair and square. Shmuck or not he was president but most journalists continued to justify their own partisan blinders because he was a shmuck.

We’ll see whether today’s journalists will be able to make her “tough adjustment”. I don’t believe they will, preferring to see themselves as party operatives. The present Kerenskyite position the media has taken over the last year in which white supremacists are a threat to the republic while left anarchists who are as bad if not worse go largely unreported does not bode well for such an adjustment. Such views are likely to have the same consequences today as they had for Kerensky.