There have been two noteworthy developments in elite journalism in the past week or so, which I think are significant more for the reactions they inspired than for their actual importance.
First, the Trump regime assumed control of press access to White House events. The White House Correspondents' Association announced that "it would no longer coordinate shared coverage of President Donald Trump in an escalating dispute over press access to official events." "The 'WHCA cannot ensure that the reports filed by government-selected poolers will be held to the same standards that we have had in place for decades,'" announced the WHCA President, Eugene Daniels.
This change should certainly be borne in mind by all consumers of news, but how much of a change is it, really? The standards of White House press coverage have always been low. The questions asked by reporters have generally been embarrassingly low in quality, with a few notable exceptions, and those exceptions were usually met with evasive, stonewalling answers. Reporters who failed to conform with the ritual could be excluded, and it wasn't clear whether the WHCA or the White House excluded them. Despite the pretense that the press and the government are adversaries rather than collaborators, as the WHCA's announcement tacitly admits, it didn't matter.
I remembered that the White House press corps complained that Barack Obama wasn't holding press conferences in 2010, and that too was supposedly a threat to press freedom. I disagreed then, and I disagree now. The press could, in principle, refuse to play along, refuse to participate in the ritual dance between reporter and subject. In practice that would never happen, because there will always be scabs who will show up to stroke the President's or other official's ego by asking sycophantic questions.
If Obama is too long ago, the Biden-Harris administration also showed the futility of most press conferences. Biden also was elusive, and when asked, his spokespeople simply repeated the propaganda line they'd been given. Kamala Harris also evaded substantive questions during her failed presidential campaign. For what it's worth, Donald Trump has been much more available to the press than his predecessors, but few outside his cult are satisfied with the results.
The media don't really need the President's presence. I always mention the great independent reporter I. F. Stone in this connection: when he was excluded from the Washington press corps during the Truman administration, he continued working independently as an investigative reporter on his own one-person newsletter, I. F. Stone's Weekly. Some of his stories shook up US government claims; imagine what the huge media institutions could do if they devoted their resources to that kind of work, instead of cultivating connections with government insiders. In fact, they sometimes do. They don't need access. As Stone said:
I made no claims to 'inside stuff'. I tried to give information which could be documented, so [that] the reader could check it for himself ... Reporters tend to be absorbed by the bureaucracies they cover; they take on the habits, attitudes, and even accents of the military or the diplomatic corps. Should a reporter resist the pressure, there are many ways to get rid of him. ... But a reporter covering the whole capital on his own – particularly if he is his own employer – is immune from these [political] pressures.
The second journalism story was Amazon founder and now owner of the Washington Post Jeff Bezos, who announced last Wednesday that the Post Opinion Page will henceforth "be writing every day in support and defence of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets."
He added the opinion section would cover other topics, but “viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others”.Seventy-five thousand digital subscribers have reportedly canceled their subscriptions to the Post in protest of Bezos's move. There was a similar backlash last year when he announced that the paper would no longer endorse presidential candidates. He claimed that endorsements "create a perception of bias," though his intervention to kill a planned editorial endorsement of Kamala Harris did just that. Does it matter, though? These moves aren't going to make most people suddenly trust elite corporate media, or any media. From what I can tell, distrust of news media isn't based on any informed or rational evaluations anyway. Media consumers tell pollsters that they value "accuracy above all else," but how do they know what's accurate?
“There was a time when a newspaper, especially one that was a local monopoly, might have seen it as a service to bring to the reader's doorstep every morning a broad-based opinion section that sought to cover all views,” Bezos wrote. “Today, the internet does that job.”
Bezos has a point, though it doesn't make him look any better. In the days when even smaller cities had more than one newspaper, it was normal for editorials to reflect the owners' political bias, and objectivity was always a mirage. That didn't really change as the news industry became increasingly monopolized, and while Bezos's invocation of the Internet is in typical bad faith, there are more alternatives available than ever before. Even if Washington DC had several major newspapers, someone who wanted to be well-informed should look beyond the local product. In the past, such a person would at least look to the New York Times as well as the Post. There were daily radio and TV news programs, weekly news magazines, and other sources. Tearing one's hair over the misbehavior of one newspaper owner is as disingenuous as gnashing one's teeth over the loss of access to inside sources. But that's what passes for responsible commentary, then and now.
