In an earlier post on this site (When Did Reporters Become Wimps), I noted that many journalists, who used to be called enterprise or investigative reporters, have become less aggressive.  Even worse, some have become shills for the political interpretation of the news.

But it is important to note that this has not always been the case. As recently as the 1970s and 1980s, reporters were objective and called out public officials who publicly lied to their constituents. All this was done in news conferences and taped interviews.

Indeed, it was the job of the media to be the watchdog against lies entering the domain of public discussion and to engage people in public education about U.S. institutions and their duties as citizens.

The Trump presidency has changed this entire process and made it easier to lie to the public without interference from individual reporters. Take the case of the recent White House Press Association dinner in which a deranged Trump directly belittled the journalism professionals in the audience. Why would anyone in any professional office situation, anywhere in the country, just sit there as their profession or colleagues were being ridiculed by a convicted criminal?

This could have been a scene from a gangster movie in which the Mafia boss was belittling a subordinate, but the victim was surrounded by gunmen.  There were no gunmen in the ballroom at that press association dinner, so why didn’t whole tables of people walk out of the speech?

Is it disrespectful to disrespect a sociopath who has no respect for the presidential office?

Maybe it was peer pressure to sit there.  The reporters were probably afraid of losing their jobs or being berated by their corporate HR heads for being “disrespectful.”  Maybe they should not have gone to the dinner in the first place. Let Trump speak to an empty hall. Or, maybe the reporters who just sat there are just wimps.

After all, they had seen their journalism colleagues berated by Trump in press conferences and rallies before, and they did nothing.

Reasons for the Professional Changes

There are good reasons why journalists have become more timid over the past few decades:

• The rise in corporate ownership, media consolidation, and the willingness to use this ownership to further the Trump-MAGA agenda in exchange for less regulation;
• The rise of social media and alternative sources of news;
• The consistent lying to the public by Trump and his cohorts that overwhelmed traditional fact-checking and normalized lying to the public;
• Changing demographics of news consumers;
• The rise of alternative sources of news from social media;
• Distrust of the government, and by inference, the news media;
• The rise in propaganda networks, such as FOX and Newsmax, and foreign interference in social media;
• Changes in the demographics of people (editors and reporters) entering news journalism;
• Intimidation of reporters from government sources and public thugs;
• Job and career preservation in a job category that is rapidly compressing.

Numerous studies have found that people in the age group of many reporters in the White House press corps dinner ballroom are afraid of confrontation.  “Many young people are now more inclined to seek harmony, cooperation and effective communication than to actively engage in conflict,” according to Simon Sinek.  

This does not only apply to younger people. President Barack Obama was also afraid of confrontation. In the book Leading From Behind, by Richard Miniter, Obama was a weak leader who often let Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, and Valerie Jarrett make key decisions for him on issues related to the budget, including the attack on Osama bin Laden that was delayed and canceled three times.  The book says Obamacare was not Obama’s idea, but originated with Nancy Pelosi.

Older and younger people can be wimps. Numerous recent studies found that young people don’t want to judge anyone. They are afraid of offending someone, aka “conflict avoidance.”  They are afraid they will call attention to themselves as a bully or else as a person who does not go along with the flow, even if the flow leads into a cesspool.

Many professional journalists at the White House Press Association dinner were probably in their mid-20s to 40s and fall into this category.  These Washington, D.C., reporters love the access to the elites and the rich and famous who visit Congress, free dinners from lobbyists, and expense accounts. Some even think they are “friends” with the elites they interview or that they will run in the same social and economic circles once the reporter gets a new job. Or else they hope that being a toothless reporter will get them a recommendation for a new job.

The funny thing is, and experience proves it, when the reporters retire, they will not be hanging around with the Congressmen or the Secretary of Everything. Far from it. They will be back in their own socio-economic groups and telling their work experience to relatives, kids, and partially interested people at dinner parties who will smile and say “That must have been interesting.”

Return to Old School Reporting

Classic journalism education, including books by Walter Lippmann, Thomas Jefferson, John Peter Zenger, Edward R. Morrow, Walter Cronkite, and others who firmly believed in freedom of the press and intellectual freedom, was often well known to working reporters and was applied in daily reporting.  Reporters trained in old-school methods were also aware of their responsibility as journalists and the role of a free press. This is why freedom of the press has been defined as one that “consists of the right to publish with impunity, truth, good motives and for justifiable ends,” as quoted in the book, Freedom of the Press from Zenger to Jefferson.

The keywords here are “good motives and for justifiable ends.” That is what is missing from the Trump campaign that says it will not abide by the election results and from the media that supports this candidate who is seeking to destabilize the nation.

Of course, journalism has always had its opportunists and power mongers, like William Randolph Hearst, Col. McCormick, William Loeb, and Roger Ailes, but until Ailes, these ideologically driven conservative publishers were kept in check by a more financially stable and serious press, both broadcast and print.

But over the past few decades, journalism has fundamentally changed both economically and politically due to these factors: the rise of the Internet, conservative think tanks that linked with FOX, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 that made it easier for vertical media monopolies to form, Christian Evangelicals that entered the media world, and high-paid conservative shills, such as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, and others.

All this was accompanied by a carefully orchestrated false claim of a “liberal media” conspiracy even when it was clear that monopoly capitalism in the media was driven by conservatives.

So it is not surprising that in a contracting journalism industry, reporters are afraid of losing their jobs for exercising their intellectual and political independence in an ideologically driven media company. That is not expected since this would happen in an industry where job performance can be tainted by politics.

But it is especially anti-democratic when it becomes visible to the public in the recent presidential debates.  For instance, FOX host Chris Wallace said before the interview that he would not assume the role of fact-checker during the debates. This is very odd since the role of any reporter is to be a fact-checker, even when moderating a presidential debate with Trump, whose ability to lie is well- known.

Wallace made another glaring mistake when he asked Trump if he ever met Putin.  But in an interview conducted by Wallace himself, Wallace asked Trump if he ever met Putin, and Trump replied in his typical elliptical way that he did meet him, but in the debate, Wallace conveniently forgot that Trump said otherwise to Wallace’s face.

Remember Helen Thomas

The new cohort of reporters who cover any legislative events at the local, state, county, and national levels should take a refresher course in pre-internet journalists.  These wre people who interviewed people and wrote down notes using a pencil, were masters at asking tough questions, and getting answers. They knew how to use the phone as a weapon and were not afraid to call sources at all hours.  They traded information, and they followed a pubic official for an answer until they were pushed away or the door was slammed in their face.

The famed White House reporter Helen Thomas, who worked for wire services for decades. She covered the White House during the administrations of ten U.S. presidents—from the Kennedy administration to the second year of the Obama administration. Thomas was the first female officer of the National Press Club and the first female member and president of the White House Correspondents’ Association. Her ghost would be outraged at what the toothless group the White House Correspondents Association had become.

She was a great example of asking questions and follow-up questions until she got under the skin of the public official.  She was old school; a respected female journalist in a predominantly male profession.

Videos of her asking questions in a press conference show that her fellow reporters also let her do her job. Unlike today, when young reporters have to ask questions, many of them inane and off-topic, so their bosses can see they are on the job, reporters in Thomas’ day listened to the questions and the answers. If the answers were incomplete, the other more experienced reporters would follow up. These old-school reporters did not have attention deficit disorder that young reporters have today.

Many young White House reporters make fools of themselves by asking questions that are unimportant, or that cater to the official who wants to escape the spotlight.  I get the impression that many young reporters who ask dumb questions just want to go back and tell their party friends they asked the president a question today in order to gain some ego points.

Corporate Journalism Remains the Obvious Problem

Some of the major networks have abandoned any pretext about being independent and objective, but have not told their viewers. For instance, CNN hired former Trump campaign advisor Corey Lewandowski to be an on-air Trump supporter. I assume they also hired a pro-Clinton advocate, but why hire these people at all? Not only is it bad ethically, but it also makes for boring commentary since, for instance, Lewandowski’s paid job is to distort or defend anything Trump says, regardless of whether it is true or logical.

This is why CNN and FOX have these large political panel discussions where there are six or seven contributors arranged in a screen montage that resembles the introduction to The Brady Bunch. Come to think of it, the Brady Bunch was often more intelligent than many of the political discussions I have heard on FOX and CNN.

What Happens When the Press Fails To Do Its Job

In a 1947 report from the Hutchins Commission on Freedom of the Press, the Commission suggested that people have the right to know what, and if the media fails, the government has the right and duty to step in and ensure that the right information is disseminated to the public.  The report was chaired by Robert Hutchins of the University of Chicago, and as expected, the report was greeted coolly by the press at the time.

Now, the role of the government with regard to freedom of the press is a thorny constitutional issue.

But if there is anything the 2016 presidential election process has demonstrated to the public, it is that the press has to rediscover its public duty.  Hopefully, FOX will implode as a result of its sex scandals, followed downward by multi-millionaire, neocon, free-market media ideologues, such as Limbaugh, Hannity, O’Reilly, Larry Kudlow,  Maria Bartiromo, Neil Cavuto, Stuart Varney, and Lou Dobbs.  And even if Trump creates an America-first media network, we can be confident it will also follow the same trajectory as Trump’s other businesses: a flash followed by a downward spiral.

So does this mean reporters will still be considered wimps? Certainly not, especially if younger staff reporters go back and study what press freedom and responsibility are all about.  Remember the work done by Watergate investigative reporters Woodward and Bernstein, who shaped a whole generation of serious, critical reporters.  Younger people in journalism should take note: Those who have confidence will be able to find media work if they have the backbone to talk truth to power.