Malbec said:
What you should be saying is that the President has a point. While it is a constitutionally-protected right of all Americans to engage in free speech, it is the responsibility of a professional press to act in a responsible manner. That press has a duty to the public to provide information that is both truthful and accurate, properly sourced and corroborated, equitable to all subjects that are newsworthy without extraneous bias that informs not only with facts, but with proper context and without spectacular exaggeration. There are too many pundits in the Press Room and not enough correspondents.
Yes, the press has a responsibility to act in a responsible manner. By and large they do. They work hard to make sure stuff is properly sourced and corroborated. In the internet age, there is a heightened tension today for reporters between the need to be first and to be right. Old school editors would tell you that you had to be both, without sacrificing one for the other. That's much harder today than it was even 20 years ago. Sometimes, reporters get it wrong. But by and large they get it right -- and the mainstream outlets pride themselves on getting it right.
You have a valid point that I agree with about too many pundits. (I could quibble that the pundits aren't in the press room; the reporters go to the press room, and the pundits just watch the video or pick up on what the reporters report. But it's still a valid point.) The lines have become blurred between pundits and reporters. There have always been opinion columnists, and there have always been straight reporters, and the lines used to be very clear. Now, in the age of 24-hour cable TV, when media outlets have so much airtime to fill with content, they often turn to print reporters to be talking heads, which blurs the lines sometimes. Newspapers sometimes have their reporters do "analysis" pieces. The intent is good and honest; they're trying to go beyond the headlines and statements of public figures to provide some context and, well, analysis. But of course, because analysis can open the door to a degree of subjectivity, this is a place where the lines can get a bit blurry. Some outlets do a better job than others. On TV, CNN (from what little I see of it, 99% of which is on election nights) does a rather poor job. They try to provide balance by having partisans from both sides, and it's just an unholy mess. On the other hand, PBS' "Washington Week" program does a good job. They have a panel of print reporters talking about the week's events; they provide analysis, which does sometimes bleed into opinion, but it's informed opinion and not partisan. They try very hard to be fair. Newspapers usually try to clearly label analysis pieces as such, so readers can separate them from straight reporting. Even so, that distinction is easily lost.
And let's be realistic about something that almost never gets talked about: A major reason why the media began doing more analysis is because politicians of all stripes became much more sophisticated at manipulating the media. They learned how to manage news cycles. They learned how to obfuscate with misleading or even false statements. If you just report the "facts" of who said what, media manipulators can easily manipulate the story so that people don't know what reporters know about what actually happened.
The relationship between much more adversarial after Watergate and Vietnam. We've become so used to this changed environment that most Americans don't remember how chummy the media were with presidents before LBJ. Americans trusted the federal government, so reporters tended to trust government, too. All that changed when Americans saw how badly they'd been lied to about Vietnam and Watergate. The press became much, much more watchdog, and politicians learned how to navigate that environment and how to manipulate the media. That's a big part of where we are today.
Of course, none of this has to do with Trump. Trump has no interest in the media's responsibility for "responsible" behavior. He's the king of irresponsible behavior. Trump cares about positive coverage and about winning. I honestly believe that he would be happy with the kind of controlling relationship that Putin has with the media; that is, if government were able to limit the freedom of the press, Trump would be utterly untroubled by it. Thomas Jefferson said that, if given a choice between a free press and no government or government and no free press, he'd take the free press. Trump would make the opposite choice. If he had his druthers, he'd say the press is free as long as they're Pravda.
"Free your ass and your mind will follow." -- George Clinton
