During an interview with USA Today Washington Bureau Chief Susan Page on Friday’s CBS This Morning, fill-in co-host Bianna Golodryga expressed concern that the anonymous anti-Trump op/ed published in The New York Times would contribute to the public’s “erosion of trust” in the news media.
“And Susan, you know there’s an erosion of trust in our industry as well, as journalists. A big debate as to whether The New York Times should have printed this anonymous op/ed at all,” Golodryga observed. She then asked Page: “How soon do you expect that we will find out who the author was and how much pressure is on The New York Times to up the ante and make sure that this really was a high-level official?”
Page assured Golodryga: “The people who have trust in The New York Times, I think, believe that they wouldn’t have described this person as a senior administration official if he or she had not been that.” However, the reporter did acknowledge that press had problems: “But we’ve seen this great erosion, as you say, in the news media. And one of the things that contributes to the current state of turmoil across the country is, I think, a lot of Americans just don’t know who to trust.”
Earlier in the segment, Page cited months of biased media coverage against the Trump administration to prove that the White House was embroiled in multiple “constitutional crises”:
Well, I think we have this portrait from The New York Times op/ed, from the Bob Woodward book, and from just the daily news coverage of this White House, of a president who is erratic, who is mercurial, who even his own staff doesn’t trust. That raises questions about his fitness for office. But you also have the picture of what Bob Woodward calls an administrative coup d’etat of unelected, unaccountable officials countermanding, undermining some of the decisions made by the duly elected president. Now which constitutional crisis do you worry about more? Probably depends on what you think about President Trump.
Perhaps that kind of relentless and overwhelmingly hostile coverage is the reason the liberal media is suffering an “erosion of trust.”
Here are excerpts from the September 7 exchange with Page on CBS This Morning:
8:03 AM ET
JOHN DICKERSON: USA Today’s Washington Bureau Chief Susan Page joins us now. Good morning, Susan.
SUSAN PAGE: Hey, good morning, John.
DICKERSON: So you think not one, but two possible constitutional crises may be in the offing here. Why – what do you – why is that?
PAGE: Well, I think we have this portrait from The New York Times op/ed, from the Bob Woodward book, and from just the daily news coverage of this White House, of a president who is erratic, who is mercurial, who even his own staff doesn’t trust. That raises questions about his fitness for office. But you also have the picture of what Bob Woodward calls an administrative coup d’etat of unelected, unaccountable officials countermanding, undermining some of the decisions made by the duly elected president. Now which constitutional crisis do you worry about more? Probably depends on what you think about President Trump.
DICKERSON: Can you –
GAYLE KING: Go ahead.
DICKERSON: How, Susan, does it – how do you run a railroad when this is going on? What does this do to the process of – if it’s already chaotic inside and there’s been a lot of reporting about that – how does this – how do things change now?
PAGE: You know, I don’t think our railroad is running very smoothly down a track at the moment. We have a town, a capital, that is pretty much transfixed by controversies, daily controversies over the White House and President. It’s really an extraordinary situation when you have the Vice President and almost every member of the cabinet feeling compelled to issue denials that they portrayed the President as someone who is unfit to serve. That’s just extraordinary.
(...)
BIANNA GOLODRYGA: And Susan, you know there’s an erosion of trust in our industry as well, as journalists. A big debate as to whether The New York Times should have printed this anonymous op/ed at all. How soon do you expect that we will find out who the author was and how much pressure is on The New York Times to up the ante and make sure that this really was a high-level official?
SUSAN PAGE [USA TODAY]: So again, this depends on where you stand. The people who have trust in The New York Times, I think, believe that they wouldn’t have described this person as a senior administration official if he or she had not been that. But we’ve seen this great erosion, as you say, in the news media. And one of the things that contributes to the current state of turmoil across the country is, I think, a lot of Americans just don’t know who to trust. They don’t know who to believe when these controversies come up.
(...)
