If there’s one concept that seems laughable at this point, it’s that the press needs to get much tougher on Donald Trump. Like they've all been cuddling with him? But there was Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan in Thursday’s Style section calling for more brass knuckles:
One thing is certain in the presumptive era of President Trump. Journalists are going to have to be better — stronger, more courageous, stiffer-spined — than they’ve ever been…
What we can’t do is buckle. What we can’t do is slink off and hope someone else will take care of it.
We have to keep doing our jobs of truth-telling, challenging power and holding those in power accountable — as the best journalists did during the campaign itself.’
We have to be willing to fight back.
“More than ever, we will need fearless and deep journalism,” Dan Gillmor, a journalist who teaches at Arizona State University, tweeted. “Do we have news media that even want to deliver it, apart from a few?”
I don’t know the answer to that, and I worry whether journalistic organizations — including this one — will continue to challenge a man who has shown how little taste he has for anything except adulation.
Trump may turn out to be accessible to the press — he loves the exposure, after all. Even after banning The Washington Post from his rallies, he did interviews with Post reporters; earlier, he sat for 20 hours with Post journalists writing a book about him.
Sullivan can’t admit that their “fearless” Post staff never WROTE a book about Hillary like they did about Trump. Sullivan didn’t compare and contrast -- that Trump was more accessible than Hillary Clinton, who gave the Post 10 minutes – which Anne Gearan totally squandered. Sullivan, like most other journalists, has put all her ardor and anger into opposing Trump, and next to zero on Hillary.
The Post has offered some tough and deep journalism on Trump's foundation and his businesses. There's nothing wrong with that. But they haven't been a fraction as tough on the Obamas or the Clintons. The Style section has been stuffed with sugary goo about both families.
The headline was “In the angry face of Trumpism, media must speak truth to glower.” Sullivan said nothing about whether the media needed to speak truth to Hillary. Sullivan hasn’t written Word One about what Wikileaks revealed about journalists kissing up to Hillary aide John Podesta and the leaking of CNN “town hall” questions to Hillary’s team.
Instead, there’s a lot of the usual hackneyed blather about how the press are the guardians and the essence of the First Amendment:
The Committee to Protect Journalists was right when it warned about the dangers a Trump presidency would pose. Somehow it seemed hypothetical when they did so a few weeks ago.
In a couple of months, all of those warnings will move into the realm of reality. It’s scary. But it’s time to toughen up and be as good as we can be, all of us.
“Stop saying you’re going to move to Canada. What you’ve got here is worth defending,” Jameel Jaffer, director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, wrote on Twitter.
We’re about to find out just how sturdy a document the U.S. Constitution is and whether its crucial First Amendment is any kind of defense against executive power run amok.
I deeply hope that journalists won’t normalize Trump’s behavior, as we started to see in the “Well, I guess Americans just wanted change” narrative on cable news networks as the states started to pile up for him. In fact, as it turned out, his followers wanted to throw the entire government and its values onto the bonfire.
That’s a reckless sentence, especially on a day after Trump’s haters were holding violent protests and refusing to accept the election result. Americans do want change, and they certainly are angry at so-called "objective" newspapers that so blatantly demonstrate a bias toward savaging Republicans and coddling Democrats.
This is what the Washington Post did under editor Martin Baron: canceled the position of ombudsman to address reader concerns (including bias concerns)...and replaced that position with a media columnist who goads the press to be even more biased than it's been so far in 2016.
