On Thursday, Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times wrote a column about how President Trump was treating the media as his enemy. The column was long on accusation and short on introspection. The column began, in fact, by suggesting that Trump hated reporters more than neo-Nazis. And it got worse from there.
Kristof stated:
Look, we in journalism deserve to have our feet held to the fire. We make mistakes all the time, and too often we are superficial, sensationalist, unfair, defensive or diverted by shiny objects. Critics are right that we in the national media are often out of touch with working-class America, and distressingly often, we are lap dogs instead of watchdogs. Yet for all our failings, journalism remains an indispensable constraint on power.
All of that is true. But the reason that Trump’s routine critique of the media works is that they proclaim that their only standard is the truth, and conservatives keep asking, “whose truth?” Sometimes, the media present facts. More often, they present facts mixed with opinion. Take, for example, Kristof’s next accusation:
Trump has systematically tried to delegitimize the institutions that hold him accountable — courts, prosecutors, investigators, the media — and that’s the context for his vilification of all them, for we collectively provide monitoring that outrages him.
Has he truly attempted to delegitimize courts? How so? Has he said things? Or has he actually ignored court orders? How about investigators? Has he ripped their prospective bias, or has he actually fired them? Kristof isn’t wrong that Trump has attacked all of these institutions, but has he attempted to destroy them wholesale to prevent them from monitoring him?
I dislike Trump’s overstatement of his case against the media. The vast majority of journalists don’t hate the country. But many journalists masquerade as objective fact-bringers, when they’re bringing facts and perspective intertwined. Trump accuses the media of lying about their supposedly “objective” status, and he accuses them of simply making up facts. The first accusation is correct. The second mostly isn’t; media members generally don’t make up the news. But because the media refuse to acknowledge the truth of Trump’s former accusation, they allow Trump to conflate the two, and thereby undercut their own credibility overall. Trump insists that the media have an agenda, and therefore lie; the media insist that they don’t lie, and that they therefore don’t have an agenda. Neither is correct. The media have an agenda, and they generally don’t just make things up (although they sometimes do, and they often spin facts in anti-conservative ways).
But while Kristof is castigating Trump for casting the media as an enemy, he’s accusing Trump of getting “people hurt … buoying the repressive instincts of dictators around the world … [it is possible that] our president is mentally unstable.” Does this sound like Kristof is Trump’s enemy, or merely a critic?
Kristof concludes, “So may I humbly suggest that when a megalomaniacal leader howls and shrieks at critics, that is when institutional checks on that leader become a bulwark of democracy.” Then he wonders why Trump considers the media his enemies.
It’s not that tough to understand. Trump should stop treating the media as his enemies, but the media have to stop treating Trump as their enemy, too.