“It took 10 days for the glue that holds this country together to crumble,” New York Daily News columnist Linda Stasi wrote Jan. 31, responding to President Donald Trump’s flurry of executive orders. Two weeks later, the country amazingly remains uncrumbled, but the media’s Trump-related frenzy continues.
Thomas L. Friedman, the globe-trotting New York Times columnist, led the pack with a Valentine’s Day doozy, comparing Trump’s election to Pearl Harbor and 9/11. “We have never taken seriously from the very beginning Russia hacked our election,” he told MSNBC. “That was a 9/11-scale event. They attacked the core of our democracy. That was a Pearl Harbor-scale event.”
Well, yikes. The specific event Friedman compared to 9/11 and Pearl Harbor, it should be noted, was not Russia’s literally hacking into voting machines, although MSNBC viewers could be forgiven for thinking so. It was, in Friedman’s own words, Russia’s “deliberately breaking into Democratic National Committee computers and then drip-by-drip funneling embarrassing emails through WikiLeaks to undermine (Hillary) Clinton’s (presidential) campaign.” In other words, it was the exposure of largely accurate information that made Clinton look bad, widely covered — and condemned — by the press.
Is Russia’s enthusiastic foray into hacking a serious and alarming problem? Certainly. Should we be concerned about Russia’s meddling in American politics, and its possible links to the Trump administration? Absolutely. Is there a good chance that the media will blow its remaining shreds of credibility by hyperventilating and exaggerating and bringing every single presidential kerfluffle to DEFCON 1? It sure looks like it.
Friedman’s column is a case in point. In the paragraph following his passionate call to arms regarding the serious issue of Russian hacking, Friedman blasts Trump, with equal venom, for — wait for it — criticizing the cast of “Hamilton” and actor Meryl Streep. I am not making this up.
This is simply not serious. It’s also a perfect example of the media’s inability to separate important news from run-of-the-mill Trump. Alas, perspective is in short supply these days, and Friedman seems to view himself as a hero, not a professional muddier of the waters.
And he’s not the only one busy patting his own back.
Despite the dubious distinction of polling lower than Donald Trump — his latest approval rating is 39 percent, while a Gallup poll found 32 percent of Americans have a “great deal” or a “fair amount” of trust in the media — many esteemed journalists are seemingly six drinks in at their own self-congratulatory Me Party.
Over at the Daily Beast, Lloyd Grove penned an article titled “The Journalism Empire Strikes Back.”
“Donald Trump and the people around him are being forced to confront a basic fact: Journalists matter,” Grove wrote, adding that with the recent resignation of national security adviser Michael Flynn, “#journalism as an institution has reasserted itself. Big time.”
In other words, hooray, journalists! You’re apparently back and actually doing your jobs after checking out for eight years!
It gets worse. “Even presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway,” Grove continues, “acknowledges the power of the journalism establishment in a way that her boss does not.” Grove then goes on to cite one of Conway’s most mystifying stock lines: “My big line about all this is that the White House and the news media are going to have joint custody of the country for eight years.”
Good heavens! Joint custody? That is not how any of this is supposed to work, but it is helpful in highlighting a distorted view of the roles of the media and the government. In case nobody noticed, the media and the Trump camps aren’t exactly poised for a friendly divorce. “Journalists, battered and groggy, find a renewed sense of mission,” Wednesday’s New York Times declared. That mission, it turns out, comes from the exhilarating hunt for a scalp. When it comes to stories about the Trump administration’s Russia connections, New York Times columnist Frank Rich noted, “You have what seems to be a story of Watergate proportions married to this red hot Wild West of the new mediasphere.”
As we’ve seen, that “red hot Wild West” atmosphere has led to more than its fair share of hyperventilation and flat-out mistakes.
Certainly, journalists, by all means, do your jobs. But if the status quo remains, don’t be surprised if the rest of the world tunes you out.
National Review
Heather Wilhelm is a National Review columnist and a senior contributor to The Federalist.