On Monday evening, Donald Trump held a face-to-face meeting with a bevy of mainstream-media stars: Lester Holt and Chuck Todd of NBC, George Stephanopoulos and Martha Raddatz of ABC, John Dickerson and Charlie Rose of CBS, Phil Griffin of MSNBC, and Jeff Zucker of CNN, among others. According to the New York Post, the meeting went disastrously:
Donald Trump scolded media big shots during an off-the-record Trump Tower sitdown on Monday, sources told the Post. “It was like a f***ing firing squad,” one source said of the encounter. “Trump started with [CNN chief] Jeff Zucker and said, ‘I hate your network, everyone at CNN is a liar and you should be ashamed,’ ” the source said. “The meeting was a total disaster. The TV execs and anchors went in there thinking they would be discussing the access they would get to the Trump administration, but instead they got a Trump-style dressing-down,” the source added.
Most conservatives’ first reaction will be laughter. Their second reaction will be cheering. After all, the vast majority of these media figures covered not just Trump but Republicans unfairly for years. This is the same cast of characters that somehow turned Mitt Romney, a deeply honorable human being, into a cruel sexist carrying around binders full of women, strapping dogs to the top of cars, and forcibly cutting the hair of closeted gay teens.
They deserve it. The media have obviously destroyed their own credibility. Polls show that nearly seven in ten Americans don’t trust the media. That lack of trust meant that even solidly researched stories about Trump were routinely ignored during the election cycle. Trump’s slamming the media isn’t out of bounds on a moral level.
With that said, we do have a problem: Who is going to actually cover the Trump presidency?