Members of the press will treat themselves Saturday evening to drinks and selfies with vaguely familiar celebrities before sitting down for dinner and a comedy routine presented by “The Daily Show” alum Michelle Wolf.
The annual White House Correspondents’ dinner will also feature the usual speeches about how crucial journalists are to keeping America free. They’ll no doubt be told, either from the podium or by each other, that they’re more important than ever because of the man in the White House.
It’s a gaudy affair, brimming with dreary self-congratulation. And it’s also a reminder that the press has yet to grasp that its declining credibility is largely of its own making.
We editorialized on Thursday about the damage done by courts overreaching to check President Trump. We editorialized yesterday about federal employees doing the same, to become laws unto themselves, citing Trump as an excuse. In both cases, these institutions abandon standards in favor of resisting by any means necessary.
It’s worth saying the same today of news media.
News media aren’t distrusted because of Trump. He attacks them because it works — because they were distrusted long before he went and ran for president. That so many have responded to his presidency by abandoning long-held journalistic principles, while walling themselves off in little self-affirming cloisters, is a danger not just to the industry, but the entire country.
When there’s a president so uninterested in political norms and factual accuracy, we need a trusted media. We need information about the administration to come from reliable narrators, not partisan activists. Unfortunately, today’s supposedly hard-hitting political journalism is agitprop.
Take, for example, the many times that reporters and commentators have gone on television to suggest with zero proof that the president may be mentally unstable. There is no excuse for hard news reporters to entertain such baseless speculation.
Just last week, ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos gave former FBI Director James Comey a platform on which to wink and nod to the worst of the unconfirmed rumors in the infamous Trump-Russia dossier, a highly dubious work of opposition research alleging the Russians have compromising personal and financial information about Trump. Stephanopoulos didn’t attempt to rein in Comey’s speculations or pin him down about why the provenance of the dossier was concealed.
Before that, reporters also grossly mischaracterized a revealing interaction between Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, describing the senator as a technologically challenged dotard.
These are a few of the many examples of reporters disseminating unverified or false information in a rush to make Trump and his circle look bad. There’s far more where this comes from, and it spells out a distressing trend for an industry that’s supposed to be in the truth business but is doing nothing to recoup lost credibility.
As for the Correspondents’ dinner, it’s fine for reporters and commentators to cut loose and enjoy themselves. But becoming part of the story, which is what reporters did at last year’s dinner, demonstrates the lamentable fact that the fourth estate is more interested these days in preening and prestige than in facts and accuracy.
News media are letting the public down. They’re not doing the great job they’ll congratulate themselves for tonight.
