The White House has partnered with pro-Trump activists to embarrass newsrooms by highlighting their employees’ awkward and controversial past remarks, according to the New York Times.
A better administration would just take hostile media coverage on the chin. That is all that really needs to be said about the matter. But leave it to the editors of the nation’s largest and most prestigious newsrooms to climb back up onto their crosses and play the role of the selfless martyr.
Recommended Stories
Supposedly, it is now a dastardly attack on the “free press” for pro-Trump activists to draw attention to very problematic public statements that seep out, illustrating the corruption of journalists’ thoughts — and perhaps even pointing to a sickness in the culture of the outlets that chose to employ them.
This effort may well suggest that President Trump is thin-skinned and unable to handle a hostile press. But it does not mean reporters are operating now in censorious tyranny. The inability of so many ostensibly intelligent journalists to understand the distinction is a truly amazing thing.
When government “and those working on their behalf, threaten and retaliate against reporters as a means of suppression, it’s a clear abandonment of democracy for something very dangerous,” a spokesperson for CNN said in a statement to the New York Times.
Now seems like a good time to remind you that CNN in 2017 hunted down an anonymous pro-Trump Reddit user, “HanAssholeSolo,” and used the threat of public exposure to wrestle from him an apology and a promise of good behavior.
Then in February 2018, CNN confronted a Florida woman, whom its reporters accused of unwittingly coordinating with Kremlin-connected trolls by promoting a pro-Trump Facebook page. The cable news network published the woman’s first, middle, and last names, revealed her state of residence, the county in which she lived, the exact title of the pro-Trump Facebook page with which she was associated, and broadcast images of the woman’s face. Needless to say, she became the target of intense online harassment.
Elsewhere, Huffington Post editor-in-chief Lydia Polgreen, whose newsroom published a report in 2018 exposing the familial and professional associations of an obscure pro-Trump social media troll, said of the White House’s partnership with pro-Trump social media activists, “This is an extremely alarming piece and should worry anyone who cares about independent journalism.” Really?
Former Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. said in a statement of his own, “If it’s clearly retaliatory, it’s clearly an attack, it’s clearly not journalism … It’s one thing for Spiro Agnew to call everyone in the press ‘nattering nabobs of negativism,’” he added in reference to President Richard M. Nixon’s vice president. “And another thing to investigate individuals in order to embarrass them publicly and jeopardize their employment.”
Remember: By “investigate individuals” and “embarrass them publicly,” Downie Jr. means people are looking at public Twitter accounts maintained by public individuals. Also, it is probably worth mentioning here that the Washington Post is the same newspaper that in 2014 assigned a reporter specifically to comb through the past statements of a congressional aide who published a Facebook post criticizing former President Obama’s daughters.
The most hilariously overwrought reaction from the press, however, comes from New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger, who called the effort to highlight newsroom employees’ past statements an “attack,” and an “assault.”
“This represents an escalation of an ongoing campaign against the free press,” he warned. “[T]he political operatives behind this campaign will argue that they are ‘reporting’ on news organizations in the same way that news organizations report on elected officials and other public figures. They are not. They are using insinuation and exaggeration to manipulate the facts for political gain.”
The New York Times report itself attempts to explain why it is very terrible for pro-Trump operatives to peruse the social media accounts of reporters.
“[U]sing journalistic techniques to target journalists and news organizations as retribution for — or as a warning not to pursue — coverage critical of the president is fundamentally different from the well-established role of the news media in scrutinizing people in positions of power,” the report reads.
I cannot stress enough that what these people are calling “assault” and “targeting” is an effort to comb through public statements made by individuals who shape public opinion from within the most powerful and prestigious newsrooms in the United States. The “attack” on the free press is nothing more dastardly than reporters and editors having their public remarks quoted. Some people seem to think it is too good for the gander.
