Journalists lecture that Trump never admits he’s wrong, but when you’re invested in the Trump-the-traitor conspiracy theory, you cannot admit they overreached. Take Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan, who refused to budge on the media’s partisan aggression. The online headline for her Tuesday column was "Serious journalists should be proud of — not bullied over — their Russia reporting."
Relentless negativity is always a positive (and professional) achievement:
It should be no surprise to anyone that President Trump’s reaction to the Mueller report is to attack reporters for doing their jobs.
That’s exactly what he has been doing for years. It’s a predictable political strategy — an ugly, undemocratic one — that works as a way to feed raw meat to his base.
And it should be no surprise that his media echo chamber — led by Fox News Channel’s Sean Hannity — is calling for the heads of journalists whose work Hannity couldn’t begin to emulate even if given 100 years.
Just doing their jobs, eh? This is Sullivan slavishly borrowing from her hero, Post executive editor Martin Baron, who risibly claimed "We're not at war. We're at work."
When the Post labored mightily to take down Nixon, they were just “doing their jobs.” When the Post worked to defeat George Allen with "Macaca" mania, they were just "doing their jobs." When the Post tried to defeat Mitt Romney with ancient tales of haircut bullying, they were “just doing their jobs.”
In the end, conservatives should insist that “just doing their jobs” at 1301 K Street is defined as “helpfully providing the Democrat spin, with the added authoritative echo of the Reality-Based Media.”
Sullivan calls the liberal media the “Reality-Based Media,” but she doesn’t want to acknowledge Reality when the news is positive for Donald Trump. Check this passage:
It’s important to acknowledge the value of the serious journalism because there’s a real risk that news organizations will take the edges off their coverage of this subject now. You could see it starting to happen over the weekend.
It was strange, for example, to see Scott Pelley’s lead-in to CBS’s 60 Minutes erroneously describe the Mueller report’s findings in a way that Trump might have scripted: He flatly stated that the report, as described by Attorney General William P. Barr, exonerated the president.
It’s true, Scott Pelley’s statement on Sunday night lacked the program's usual “edges.” It stated the facts:
PELLEY: Late today, President Trump was exonerated in a letter to Congress from Attorney General William Barr. Barr told congress that the nearly two year independent special counsel investigation determined that no one in the president's campaign colluded with the Russian effort and, in Attorney General Barr's opinion, the evidence shows Mr. Trump did not interfere with the investigation.
Sullivan praised Pelley for his leftist “edges” when he was the CBS Evening News anchor proclaiming that Trump was at war with “reality.” Back then he was "showing his bias for the truth."
Sullivan worried that "some news organizations may back down from aggressive coverage of Trump. That would be a serious mistake. With some regrettable and damaging exceptions — individual stories that seemingly went too far — reality-based news outlets have done quite well on this story."
This, to be blunt, is a full-throated defense of, and battle cry for, a crusading liberal bias. It's as if media professionalism is best defined as sharpening the "edges" of partisan aggression.
