It’s Yahoo! News’s Alexander Nazaryan’s turn in the barrel this week following the publication of an op-ed originally titled, “I Miss the Thrill of Trump.”
Nazaryan’s article, which has since been retitled “I Was an Enemy of the People,” drew harsh rebukes Thursday for its comically self-important tone, including a line that compares the “thrill” of covering the Trump White House to the “thrill” that the Allied troops must have felt when they stormed the beaches of Normandy.
But let’s go easy on Nazaryan. It’s not as if he is the first journalist to characterize the mere act of reporting on the Trump administration as an exceptionally heroic and selfless undertaking. He certainly didn’t pioneer the genre.
Indeed, many have come before Nazaryan, and they have all done quite well for themselves, professionally and financially speaking. Can you fault the guy for trying to get a piece of the action?
Right off the bat, the Atlantic op-ed sets itself up for failure when its subhead declares: “Without quite meaning to, Trump reminded journalists that their relationship to power should be adversarial.”
Journalists needed a reminder?
“Thrilling, without a single boring day: That’s how I’d describe my four years as an enemy of the people, a lanyard-wearing member of the ‘Lügenpresse,’ a term some Donald Trump supporters borrowed from the Nazis to refer to insufficiently flattering coverage of their movement, or of the man who led it,” reads the article’s opening paragraphs.
It adds, “I miss it already. I miss it terribly, even if I miss little else about the past four years. Without quite meaning to, Trump reminded journalists that their relationship to power should be adversarial. I hope my colleagues in the press corps (I am a national correspondent for Yahoo News) remember that, as some measure of pre-Trumpian courtliness returns to the White House briefing room.”
Then comes the part that caught the most criticism, the part where Nazaryan draws comparisons between the White House press corps and the D-Day landing parties.
“Covering the administration was thrilling for many journalists, in the way that I imagine storming Omaha Beach must have been for a 20-year-old fresh from the plains of Kansas,” writes Nazaryan. “He hadn’t signed up for battle, but there he was, liberating France. France, by the way, is where Trump called American soldiers who’d fallen in combat ‘suckers’ and ‘losers.’”
It adds, “When this magazine first reported those comments, Trump’s supporters denounced the Atlantic story as preposterous and offensive, even as outlet after outlet confirmed the reporting. They failed to realize that the preposterous and the offensive were the twin beacons of the Trump presidency. Journalists were merely going where he led. This was our Omaha Beach. I, for one, would have rather been in Hawaii.” (Relatedly, please read this harrowing account of what it was actually like to land on the beaches of Normandy. This account, by the way, was published in 1960 by the Atlantic.)
It’s not surprising that Nazaryan’s article has inspired mockery. But compare the language of his op-ed to how some of the biggest names in the news business, especially those who rose to media stardom on the back of the Trump ratings boom, have described themselves, what they do for a living, and what it was like to report on America’s 45th president.
“Like firefighters who run into a fire, journalists run towards a story,” MSNBC’s Katy Tur, for example, said in 2017.
“The media never fully learned how to cover Trump. But they still might have saved democracy,” Washington Post columnist and former New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan declared after the 2020 election.
CNN host Don Lemon, who has suffered nothing under the Trump presidency, also said after the election, “I can’t tell you how difficult it’s been as a journalist to cover this dark part of our history.”
His colleague, Jim Acosta, wrote a book about his experiences covering the Trump White House titled The Enemy of the People: A Dangerous Time to Tell the Truth in America. American Urban Radio Networks staffer April Ryan wrote a book titled Under Fire: Reporting from the Front Lines of the Trump White House.
And so on. None of the names mentioned above have inspired the same widespread derision that the Atlantic op-ed inspired Thursday, even though they’ve engaged in similarly conceited self-praise.
If anything, Nazaryan’s biggest mistake is that he wrote his article after Trump left office. Had his Atlantic op-ed published anywhere between 2015 and 2020, Nazaryan probably would’ve landed a cable news contract and maybe even a book deal.
Alas, though, he was slow to the draw. And now his op-ed is being mocked for doing what so many reporters and commentators did between 2015 and 2021. It’s enough to make one feel bad for the guy.
