You need two sides for that.
“ Sick people .” “ Fake news .” “ Crooked .” “ Dishonest .” People who are “ trying to take away our history and our heritage .” The current American president is not a fan of the current American press. “I really think they don’t like our country,” Donald Trump explained, at a rally in Phoenix in August; the elaboration, at that point, of course, was unnecessary. Margaret Sullivan, a media columnist for The Washington Post, has called Trump’s angry dismissals of the American new media, as a whole, “the most sustained attack any president has ever made on the news media.”
The attacks are extreme. They are excerpted, albeit with a distinctly Trumpian flair, from the authoritarian handbook. They may well end in physical violence waged against members of the American media. And though they may be discussed, often, as battles in Trump’s “war” on that media, they are not, strictly, that. It takes two to war, after all—and as Sullivan’s boss, Marty Baron, reminded the public on Wednesday, the American press is not engaged in a wide-scale battle with the president. They are engaged in that most peaceful of things: doing their jobs.
“We’re not at war; we’re at work,” Baron told an audience at the Washington Ideas Forum, sponsored by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic. And the job in question, he noted, is mandated by the First Amendment. The day after Trump’s inauguration, Baron reminded viewers, Trump had gone to the CIA and delivered a talk that went out of its way to emphasize the martial overtones of the president/press relationship. (“As you know,” the new executive told the gathered intelligence agents, “I have a running war with the media.” He added: “They are among the most dishonest human beings on earth.”)
But while the president and the press are oppositional by nature—the one with its interest in opacity; the other with its interest in the opposite—what the president has construed as a war is, in fact, business as usual. This isn’t the first time, Baron pointed out, that journalists have met the business end of presidential ire: Nixon, he noted, as Post reporters were investigating Watergate, used similar (if not similarly aggressive) rhetoric against journalists. And the Nixon-era public, as well, held the press in relatively low esteem. And, yet, the story was broken. The president was held accountable. The job was done.
This is a time of sides: partisanship, opposition, “some very fine people on both sides.” And during Baron’s conversation with Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic, one editor asked the other about the Post ’s new motto—“Democracy Dies in Darkness”—and whether it frames the Post and its mission as part of the anti-Trump “resistance.”
Baron’s “no” was emphatic. “We don’t view ourselves as part of the resistance,” he said. The alliterative motto was in the works well before Trump was inaugurated, he noted—a mission statement that came about with input from the Post ’s owner of nearly four years, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon. And the motto isn’t merely a tagline. It’s a job description. “That is our mission,” Baron said: “to shine light in dark corners and hold the government accountable.”
