Much as they might wish to — and they do, they do — politicians don’t get to choose the members of the press who cover them.
The smart ones play the hands they are dealt. They know how to curry favor with the scribes, feeding them tips that will lead to good stories, walking the tightrope between on the record, on background, off the record.
The unwise common wisdom that because many reporters and editors are more politically liberal than your insurance agent means that the press protects liberal pols and goes after conservative ones is demonstrably untrue. Two words: Barack Obama. “Obama came into office pledging open government, but he has fallen short of his promise. Journalists and transparency advocates say the White House curbs routine disclosure of information and deploys its own media to evade scrutiny by the press. Aggressive prosecution of leakers of classified information and broad electronic surveillance programs deter government sources from speaking to journalists,” according to an investigative report by the Committee to Protect Journalists during Obama’s first term.
But the tension is ancient, even on the short American timeline. Thomas Jefferson said of Federalist editors: “They never utter a truth,” and “Every syllable from me is distorted.”
Which brings us to what would be merely the opera bouffe, if it weren’t so dystopian, present, a time in which President Donald Trump bans reporters from the Associated Press news agency from Air Force One and pool coverage because their editors decline to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America on a whim.
Doesn’t Trump know that this whole thing is just a bit, a parodic idea created by liberal comic Stephen Colbert back when he pretended to be a crackpot conservative?
Doesn’t he know he sounds like the newly created Central American dictator in “Bananas,” who announces to a crowd, “Hear me. I am your new president. … All citizens will be required to change their underwear every half hour. Underwear will be worn on the outside, so we can check”?
Doesn’t he know that his big business buddies are now laughing at him behind his back, even as their own portfolios are withering in the Trump “correction”? That it’s only the California tech bros who will now “stand back and stand by,” because the oligarchs literally want our economy to collapse, so they can snap up assets on the cheap, Moscow-style, once we go fully post-democracy?
Whatever. It’s just no fun anymore, trying to laugh at the current president when his completely insane economic policies are crashing the equities markets, which is nothing like an abstraction when you’re approaching retirement and your 401(k) is in the tank because the president of the United States, the bankruptcy king, doesn’t understand the fundamentals of international finance and trade.
No one in the media, by the way, supports the Trump ban on AP reporters. Dozens of news organizations have signed a letter of protest sent to the president, including, yes, The New York Times, CNN and the Washington Post — but also Fox News, the Wall Street Journal and the far-right Newsmax.
The White House Correspondents’ Association coordinated the letter decrying the ban of The Associated Press as “an escalation of a dispute that does not serve the presidency or the public.”
“The First Amendment prohibits the government from asserting control over how news organizations make editorial decisions. Any attempt to punish journalists for those decisions is a serious breach of this constitutional protection.”
Newsmax wrote: “We can understand President Trump’s frustration because the media has often been unfair to him, but Newsmax still supports The AP’s right, as a private organization, to use the language it wants to use in its reporting. We fear a future administration may not like something Newsmax writes and seek to ban us.”
There’s the rub. And yet Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, who at the ripe old age of 27 doesn’t yet understand that a tariff is a tax on Americans, says the AP is “insulting” her for pointing that out.
You know what’s really insulting? Oligarchy.
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.