For four years, we heard that President Donald Trump is a threat to freedom of the press. The Washington Post signaled its own faux bravery by adopting the slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness” at the top of its masthead. CNN began running commercials about facts being facts, and apples being apples rather than bananas (unless, presumably, those apples identify as bananas). The New York Times championed its own supposed stunning intrepidity in covering the Trump administration.
Those four years followed eight years during which the sitting president of the United States, Barack Obama, treated the press as lapdogs. He fed them occasional treats; they licked his hand. He occasionally disciplined them; they learned silence. He asked them to bark on cue; they did. During the Obama era, scandals went underreported; egregious seizures of power were portrayed as inevitable byproducts of Republican intransigence; and Obama’s political opponents were treated as deplorable remnants of historic American bigotry.
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