Jack Shafer, a longtime media critic now with Politico, wrote an article on Monday with the wisecracking headline "Trump Is Making Journalism Great Again." In short, he argued since Trump is so hostile to the press, it's reinvigorating journalism and making it relevant. He doesn't seem to catch that he's also saying, by contrast, that Obama was then a bad thing for journalism, since everything was cozy and unchallenging. This is a "war zone," proclaims Shafer:
Instead of relying exclusively on the traditional skills of political reporting, the carriers of press cards ought to start thinking of covering Trump’s Washington like a war zone, where conflict follows conflict, where the fog prevents the collection of reliable information directly from the combatants, where the assignment is a matter of life or death. [PolitiFact check? Which reporter has been shot?]
In his own way, Trump has set us free. Reporters must treat Inauguration Day as a kind of Liberation Day to explore news outside the usual Washington circles. He has been explicit in his disdain for the press and his dislike for press conferences, prickly to the nth degree about being challenged and known for his vindictive way with those who cross him. So, forget about the White House press room. It’s time to circle behind enemy lines.
Shafer, who used to be the libertarian oddball at Slate who didn't check the Democratic box at election time, displayed a complete lack of ironic distance in suggesting Trump will be feeding the "pliant reporters" like animals. So which journalist now self-righteously rumbling about "accountability" wasn't a "pliant reporter" in the Obama era?
It’s easy to predict that instead of negotiating with reporters as equals, his administration will advance its agenda by feeding more pliant reporters material the way a trainer rewards circus animals.
Based solely on the last month, we can nominate Steve Kroft, Fareed Zakaria, and Lester Holt as Obama's trained circus acts. If the media elite weren't too paranoid these days to submit to an honest poll, we'd find they overwhelmingly voted for Hillary Clinton (and maybe a few stragglers for Jill Stein).
Shafer says Trump will disrupt the cycle of reporters grooming sources and sources grooming reporters, but then he encourages the press to groom "Trump’s enemies in his own party, people like Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, who similarly wish him no good. Scratch a dozen Republicans, and you’ll find a few Trump rats."
And there's more grooming to be done. Shafer romantically imagined the unelected federal bureaucracy going to war with the elected president and Congress:
As Trump shuts down White House access to reporters, they will infest the departments and agencies around town that the president has peeved. The intelligence establishment, which Trump has deprecated over the issue of Russian hacking, owes him no favors and less respect. It will be in their institutional interest to leak damaging material on Trump. The same applies to other bureaucracies. Will a life-long EPA employ take retirement knowing he won’t be replaced, or if he is, by somebody who will take policy in a direction he deplores? Such an employee could be a fine source. Trump, remember, will only be president, not emperor, and as such subject to all the passive-aggressive magic a bureaucracy can produce. Ditto the Pentagon, the State Department, the FBI, and even conventionally newsless outposts like Transportation and Labor.
Shafer also warmly remembered how Dick Nixon's anti-press attitude, his work to "delegitimize journalists," was a "disaster." Shafer can't seem to admit the press sought to "delegitimize" Nixon, but somehow that's impolite and unfair.
Consider the Nixon administration, which presented an anti-press posture akin to Trump’s, sending Vice President Spiro Agnew to give speeches designed to delegitimize journalists. Nixon also fought with the press by seeking to block the publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971. This proved a disaster. In his book, Poisoning the Press, Mark Feldstein quotes Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg on the course-change navigated by the top newspapers in the wake of Nixon’s reaction. “A newspaper industry that for thirty years and more had been living happily ... on government handouts was suddenly in widespread revolt,” Ellsberg commented. “One paper after another was clamoring for its chance, not just to get a piece of a story but to step across the line into radical civil disobedience.”
Only at liberal sites like Politico is it considered a historic achievement for the media to cross the line into "radical civil disobedience." Imagine that being a motto under the last president, and you'd have a recipe for as IRS investigation.
