President Trump has hardly deployed discretion in his targeting of the media for political posturing, but evidently, journalists’ willingness to enter the fray has not fared well for them.
According to a POLITICO/Morning Consult poll, a majority of Americans say Trump’s actions have divided the country since he took office — but even more people say the media have divided the country.
Only 30 percent say Trump has done more to unite than divide the country. Compare that to only 17 percent who say the same about the national news media.
Trump set the stage, and the vast majority of the national news media have been keen to play the foil to the White House. Republicans bet on many in the media’s urge to #Resist, and of course, journalists’ abdication of neutrality backfired on them. Even if you find Trump’s agenda and rhetoric deeply unpalatable, he’s not subverting many expectations — either of himself, personally, or of the modern American presidency, to a more muted extent — by politicking as as a partisan. Trump may be divisive, but that, of course, is expected.
By contrast, straight news reporters aren’t supposed to be biased. Many of the nation’s most prominent journalists veil themselves in overblown rhetoric of deeply seated moral righteousness and a life-or-death devotion to the truth (never forget, “like firefighters who run towards a fire, journalists run towards a story!”). Yet, rather than simply acknowledging that wall-to-wall coverage of Trump’s tweets while ignoring Democratic scandals or Republican successes in itself represents a bias, CNN journalists insist “[r]eporters don’t root for a side. Period,” while they gave Michael Avenatti nightly appearances to discuss the president’s sex life in explicit detail.
The media can’t have it both ways. The easy option would be for reporters to return to simply reporting instead of pulling Jim Acosta-style publicity stunts and obsessing over petty personal points instead of granting equivalent coverage to comparable scandals. As it turns out, when journalists focus on their jobs instead of political posturing, they’re actually quite good at it. Diligent, fearless reporting from the New York Times and the New Yorker on Harvey Weinstein’s decades of sexual predation and cover-ups directly caused a bipartisan embrace of the #MeToo movement, and individual reporters at major news outlets continue to dig into corruption and scandals.
The journalists who do parade themselves on the cover of magazines and late-night shows, winking and nodding at their roles as the vanguard of the #Resistance, do their colleagues and their industry no favors. After decades of grandstanding and a job specifically evolved to push a partisan agenda, Trump surprises no one in his willingness to get in the gutter to advance an agenda or a narrative.
But so long as the media think that they can have it both ways, at the helm of objective truth as well as of a political movement, the public’s faith and trust in the Fourth Estate will continue to falter.
