Why Is the Media Defending Michelle Wolf?

To which the New York Times’ ace national security reporter, David Sanger, responded:

My translation of Sanger: The JFK quote reminds us that the First Amendment, in a different political time, induced presidents to acknowledge both the value of press criticism and, more generally, the importance of a vigorous media to national success.

But it was a different time in more ways than simply a president being respectful toward the press. And JFK’s speech involved much more than praise of the media.

The quote in question came from an address Kennedy gave to the Newspaper Publishers’ Association at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City on April 27, 1961—about a week after the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion. In the run-up to the invasion, Kennedy pressured the New York Times and other publications to tone down reporting on the planned operation. A year later, he would hypocritically complain to the Times’ managing editor that his newspaper could have prevented the failed mission by more aggressive reporting.

But at the Waldorf-Astoria just after the invasion, Kennedy had a different message: As Beschloss noted, Kennedy acknowledged the importance of the press and public information about government to American democracy. But that was just throat clearing for the main point of his remarks, which concerned the damage the press could cause by publishing national security secrets.

In the rest of his remarks, Kennedy practically begged the press to show more restraint in its publication of “unauthorized disclosures to the enemy.” He asked “every publisher, every editor, and every newsman in the nation to reexamine his own standards, and to recognize the nature of our country’s peril.” He reminded the gathered journalists that “in time of ‘clear and present danger,’ the courts have held that even the privileged rights of the First Amendment must yield to the public’s need for national security.” He recalled that America’s foes “have openly boasted of acquiring through our newspapers information they would otherwise hire agents to acquire through theft, bribery, or espionage.” He appealed to “every citizen’s sense of sacrifice and self-discipline” in asking the media to exercise its patriotic “duty of self-restraint which that danger imposes upon us all.”

And he suggested that every newspaper, in addition to asking about a story’s newsworthiness, also ask the question: “Is it in the interest of the national security?”

Beschloss and Sanger are right to suggest that JFK was much more solicitous of the press than the current president. But norms related to the press have changed in many other ways since Kennedy’s day.

Today a president would be criticized as acting contrary to the spirit of the First Amendment if he invoked patriotism as a criterion of constraint in reporting national security secrets, or if he suggested that the press-self censure the publication of these secrets.

And today the press regularly publishes highly classified secrets secrets—about covert and other sensitive intelligence and military operations, foreign intelligence collection tools, and intelligence intercepts that reveal sources and methods and contain private U.S. person information–that are much more damaging than the ones Kennedy complained about. They do so, moreover, on a scale that would have been unthinkable in Kennedy’s day. This reflects a dramatic norm change over the last 50 years, which has been largely accepted both legally and politically.

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The media’s relationship with the president has also been marked by norm changes. Its chummy and largely protective rapport with JFK has changed to a more adversarial posture over the decades, culminating in the Trump era with a historically oppositional attitude toward the president.

Part of this opposition is due to financial incentive. As I wrote last year, many news outlets “have at times seemed to cast themselves as part of the resistance to Trump, and seen their revenues soar.” And part of it is due to technological changes. Social media and cable news are venues where many ostensible news reporters “let their hair down . . . with opinionated anti-Trump barbs that reveal predispositions and shape the way readers view their reporting.”

The Times has recognized the problem by acknowledging that “if our journalists are perceived as biased or if they engage in editorializing on social media, that can undercut the credibility of the entire newsroom.” But the Times’ guidelines designed to stop this practice have failed and many of its reporters continue to reveal their deep hostility to Trump.

The main reason for this norm change, however, is Trump’s unprecedentedly vicious and abusive treatment of the press, as well as his many lies (and other untoward behaviors). It would have been very hard for the press—especially the outlets under attack—to maintain anything close to an appearance of detachment and independence in covering such a president. And the press has, overall, failed at this difficult task. It has instead committed the same blunder as Marco Rubio did when he called attention to Trump’s small hands: It has often descended to Trump’s level, and hurt itself in the process.

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Which brings us to the second event of the weekend: Michelle Wolf’s vicious comedy roast of Trump and his administration at the 2018 White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner. No one would claim that Wolf’s words would have been inappropriate in a comedy club, or even that she did something wrong. But she was invited by the elite press to speak at a high-profile event, and in context her routine, and especially its subsequent defenses of by journalists, played right into Trump’s hands.

Here is where a norm-change comes in: Elite media personalities openly boast that Trump and his administration deserved the unusually brutal treatment. “Before we criticize Michelle Wolf, let’s remember that Donald Trump has done and said some of the crudest things that any president in history has ever done,” said MSNBC’s Howard Fineman. “Whatever one might think of Michelle Wolf’s performance,” echoed David Corn of Mother Jones, “it’s clear that anyone who works for or supports Trump has no basis for complaining about vulgarity or personal insults.”

In other words: Maybe the treatment Trump got was crude and vulgar and insulting. But he had it coming because of his own behavior.

It is part of Trump’s evil genius that he elevates himself by inducing his critics to behave like him. “In lots of reporting, particularly on television commentary, there’s a kind of self-righteousness and smugness and people kind of ridiculing the president,” Bob Woodward correctly noted earlier this year. Woodward later added that many reporters covering Trump had “become emotionally unhinged.” In the context of the Trump presidency, an unusually strident comedy routine at the marquee journalist event, followed by claims that Trump deserved it, furthers the perception that the press hates Trump and is out to get him. It lends credence to Trump’s attacks on the bias and shortcomings of what he calls the “fake-news media.”

The media has done a great job of reporting on the many norms that Trump has violated since his presidency began. It has a lot of work to do in becoming aware of, much less reporting on, its own manifold norm-violations, or how those norm-violations work to Trump’s advantage.