The President and the Press

In recent weeks the press has been afire with indignation over President Trump’s attack on journalism as an institution. While the President has made clear that he decries only the purveyors of “fake news”and not journalism generally, the press, in part exhibiting the very behavior to which he objects, insists that he is attacking all journalists indiscriminately, with the implication that all journalists indiscriminately are essential to a functioning democracy.

The greatest frustration in attempting to analyze this situation carefully is that both parties to some degree intentionally obscure the subject. The President does so to inflame his base and to undermine the credibility of an institution that is almost monolithically opposed to his agenda. To the extent that President Trump is a political animal this is surely understandable since he has a case to make, supporters to rally, and goals to pursue. To the extent that he is President, his denunciations pose a potential danger, since a free press is invaluable in a healthy democracy.

One salient point, however, is that the press is hardly free anymore. As a matter of empirical fact, the mainstream press—and it is precisely the mainstream press that so objects to the President’s rhetoric on this subject—is animated by a harsh preconceived animosity toward the President, an animosity that has been demonstrated, both anecdotally and statistically again and again, by such places as the Media Research Center. Which leads to the second salient point: while the President should be more careful to distinguish the honest from the dishonest press, the press itself should be much more circumspect—i.e., it should not act as if it is above criticism. If it is dangerous for the President to attack so essential an institution as the press, then it is just as essential that the press maintain its integrity. If damaging the press through presidential attack is a serious threat to democracy, then it stands to reason that the press damaging itself through corruption, groupthink, and distortion or suppression of truth is just as damaging and ought to result in equally piercing alarms. That the press remains silent on this point suggests that it is not serious about the issue that it claims deeply to care about and that therefore these protests may be yet another dishonest attack on the President by a press horrified that a person so different from themselves should occupy so powerful a place in society.

Yes, the press is correct that the presidency is an enormously important institution that we should deeply respect and that the same is true of the institution of the press itself. One way to undermine such important institutions is to use intemperate rhetoric that with too broad a brush paints all journalists as corrupt. But if the President has a duty to speak with greater discrimination, then the press itself, in the interest of maintaining what it claims is the essential integrity of journalism in our nation, also has the sacred duty to judge fairly and depict accurately. And that, it has been shown, it refuses to do.

In this case the rhetoric of both the President and the press is too blunt an instrument clearly to express the truth. This is because both are to some extent demagogues. The President, however, has never specialized in nuance: that is no surprise. What is much more difficult to swallow is journalistic outrage that the President uses language precisely as the press nowadays does—in pursuit not always of truth but more often in pursuit of a political agenda. In two or six years President Trump will leave the White House. If one thinks of him as dishonest, that dishonesty will then be gone. The press, however, will remain: and the dishonesty of much of that tribe will continue to monopolize the public airwaves and occupy computer screens in pursuit of a political agenda just as stark and just as strongly pursued as the President’s.