On Sunday’s Reliable Sources, CNN host Brian Stelter organized a panel of journalists to address the vexing question of how to cover President Trump while he demeans the press. Michael Oreskes, the senior vice president for news at National Public Radio, begged Donald Trump’s attention: “I'd also make a specific point to the president-elect, who I understand watches.”
Oreskes claimed it was “not right” to conduct “personal attacks on individual journalists”…as if individual journalists aren’t conducting personal attacks on Donald Trump?
ORESKES: There's a big difference between taking on journalism as a profession or even a big institution like The New York Times and coming after young journalists. You know, we have a young journalist named Asma Khalid who covered a lot of this campaign. She's a Muslim. And she suffered a great deal of abuse this past year and she showed an extraordinary level of courage, out in the public. And she learned a lot from Trump supporters because once she started to talk to them, they understood each other.
And I think the president-elect has a responsibility as leader of the country to separate the kind of personal attacks on individual journalists from, you know, the fair game conversation about whether journalism is doing the job they are supposed to be doing, whether we’re fair, whether we're biased. I have no problem with that conversation, happy to have it with him personally.
STELTER: Right.
ORESKES: But he should not be calling out individual journalists and helping to lead an attack on them as individuals. That's not right.
Then it occurred to the NPR executive that he should add an exception:
ORESKES: By the way, I will grant one exception. As we all know, Harry Truman threatened to punch a music critic for the review that he gave to Harry Truman's daughter, if someone says something nasty about Tiffany or even Ivanka, he should go out and do what he needs to do.
That would certainly support Trump bashing Saturday Night Live, since they mocked Ivanka and her brothers as "Children of the Corn." When Stelter posted this on Twitter, conservatives replied that Obama has routinely attacked Fox News and his Justice Department probed Fox's ' James Rosen. Obama has singled out individuals in the conservative media for criticism. Does anyone recall CNN or NPR lecturing that's "not right"?
In 2009, he lectured congressional Republicans "You can't just listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done," he said during a meeting to encourage Republican lawmakers to support his economic stimulus plan.
In 2012, Obama declared “Frankly, I know that there are good, decent Republicans on Capitol Hill who, in a different environment, would welcome the capacity to work with me. But right now, in an atmosphere in which folks like Rush Limbaugh and Grover Norquist are defining what it means to be a true conservative, they are lying low.”
In 2014, in a pre-Super Bowl interview, Obama repeatedly called out Bill O'Reilly for claiming there was a Benghazi scandal that involved some presidential lying. "Folks have, again, had multiple hearings on this. I mean, these kinds of things keep on surfacing in part because you and your TV station will promote them."
In 2015, Obama slammed CBS reporter Major Garrett for asking how Obama could celebrate a new agreement with Iran that did not include American hostages in the deal. "Major, that’s nonsense, and you should know better,” he said.
It's a free country. Any president can criticize the press corps, because the press corps certainly reserves the right to criticize the president. The media can dish it out, but they don't want to take it.
