The First Amendment had a rough go of things during this year’s general election, with both parties’ nominees taking aim at it. But it has a new army of fierce defenders: President-elect Trump’s proposal of jail time or worse for flag burners galvanized the Left and the media against trimming the First Amendment.
Good. This is what the media is supposed to do. Our job, above all, is to hold the powerful people to account, especially when they seek more power.
The press earns special mention in the First Amendment for a good reason. We are necessary for the functioning of a free democratic republic. To say our role is “informing the public” is to sell it short. The most important thing we can do is to shine a spotlight on the powerful, to expose their deeds and misdeeds, and to explain the significance of what they do.
Trump’s victory spurred many editors and reporters in the legacy media to pledge themselves to serious accountability journalism. It’s easy to chuckle and wonder if these hand-wringing journalists (some of whom praised Hillary Clinton for stonewalling the media) had the same resolve under Obama. But that’s a secondary issue. On the primary issue they are right: Trump must be held accountable.
And the conservative media has a central, indispensable role in holding Trump accountable, because in some regard the liberal and mainstream media aren’t up to the job.
Already some of the liberal media are knocking Trump for personnel picks that reflect his campaign promises. Tom Price is perhaps the person best prepared to oversee the repeal and replacement of Obamacare, which was a staple of Trump’s campaign, especially in the final days where he surged ahead of Hillary Clinton. So when liberal groups blast Price as “extreme and out of touch,” for his Obamacare views, they are missing the point.
As an analogy: For the past eight years, attacking Obama as a big-government liberal seemed mostly pointless to me. That’s what he’d promised to be. I tried instead to critique Obama by holding him to his own standards. Obama said he would stop the revolving door. He said lobbyists would stop writing the rules. He said he opposed “trickle-down” policies that enrich the big guys on the promise of in turn enriching regular people.
Judging President Obama against conservative principles seemed a lot less valuable than judging President Obama against Candidate Obama.
Many liberal writers and legacy mainstream outlets are judging Trump by their own left-of-center standards. This is what they will do throughout his tenure. It will be up to the Right to judge Trump by both his own standards and by conservative standards.
When Trump wants to increase federal spending, the New York Times will complain about his priorities. It will be up to conservatives to object to the price tag and the expansion of government power.
When Trump pushes a tax cut, the Washington Post will ask cui bono? Conservatives will need to ask that same question when Trump pushes new subsidies and regulations.
Conservatives will also have to deal with Trump on his own terms where he is not conservative. While many on the Right instinctively reject populism, this election showed us that a winning coalition will always include populists unattached to Burke and Hayek. How to make populism and conservatism work together is a big part of our task.
Here’s another pitfall the major media will fall into that the conservative media should be sharp enough to avoid: taking Trump seriously, but not literally. That’s the apt phrase of my Washington Examiner colleague Salena Zito, and it highlights how much of the mainstream media totally missed the point.
As a perfect example, the Washington Post this week published a compendium of “dozens of sweeping promises [Trump] made and is now expected to fulfill.” The first one the Post mentions: “he promised his supporters that ‘every dream you ever dreamed for your country’ will come true if he becomes president.”
Trump is a unique figure. His slipperiness and inconsistency will make him very hard to cover. The mainstream media’s biases and pathologies will often lead them astray in the next four years. Conservative media will have to take up the slack.
The single worst mistake of the conservative media would be to close ranks around the Trump White House, or the Republican House or Senate. “Being a team player” is appropriate at times for political operatives or elected officials, but not for journalists, even those of us who admit our ideological leanings.
“Politicians as a class,” my old boss Bob Novak once wrote, “are up to no good. Sometimes they accidentally do the right thing.”
It’s our job to guide the Republicans in power toward those happy accidents.
Timothy P. Carney, the Washington Examiner’s senior political columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Tuesday and Thursday nights on washingtonexaminer.com.
