EDITORS' CORNER
OPINION: Trump and Nixon are the only chief execs worthy of criticism for their attacks on the media?
A professor of journalism and “communication studies” at Northwestern University must think you’re an idiot.
Heather Hendershot, who researches “American film, television, and political culture” according to her faculty page, is upset at how President Trump has treated the media during his two terms.
Trump “derided” the New York Times and offered his “usual diatribes” at the recent White House Correspondents’ dinner, she says. Also, his “extreme hostility” has led to declining “faith” in the media.
Doesn’t Trump know, as Hendershot claims, that journalists have a “professional mandate […] to strive for impartiality”? That objectivity “is impossible” and that “fairness” is the actual — and “reasonable” — objective? (The Media Research Center might have something to say about that.)
Consider the disingenuousness: Hendershot compares Trump’s attitude towards the press to that of the Nixon administration, conveniently limiting her timeframe to the last 58 years for examples.
This just happens to exclude President Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat, along with the meat of the U.S.’s involvement in the Vietnam War.
The professor also fails to offer a single example of press animosity from the other Democratic chief execs in this timeframe — Carter, Clinton, Obama, and Biden.
How come? Trump and Nixon are/were hardly unique in attacking the press. Ah, but Nixon had WATERGATE and ended up resigning to avoid inevitable impeachment. And Trump was impeached — not once, but twice!
I’ve been lying low on this site for a while, but I just saw a post from Bezos congratulating DJT, and it was the straw that broke this camel’s back. Super frustrating–this is a handy place to find links to good journalism and to keep up with breaking news stories. But I’m done.
— Heather Hendershot (@ProfHendershot) November 7, 2024
Hendershot (pictured) offers a brief summary of the Nixon administration’s more egregious moments of press conflict, such as the publication in 1971 of the Pentagon Papers. Nixon tried to thwart said publication, but was shot down by the Supreme Court.
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Those papers, which mostly cover events before Nixon’s first term in office, heavily implicate the aforementioned Lyndon Johnson administration, claiming it “systematically lied, not only to the public but also to Congress, about a subject of transcendent national interest and significance [Vietnam].”
Johnson also had referred to the heads of the New York Times as “a bunch of commies” who “want to get out of Vietnam and yield it to them.”
In addition, the 36th president asked the head of CBS News “are you trying to fuck me?,” how it could employ “a communist like [Morley] Safer,” and told the network president in reference to a Vietnam story that its reporters “shat on the American flag.”
While moderate Democrat Bill Clinton took on the media from the right and left, his two much-more progressive party successors did so almost exclusively from the latter.
Early in his White House tenure, the Obama administration declared Fox News was “not a legitimate news organization” and was “going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent.”
Obama himself said the right-leaning outlet was “ultimately destructive” to the country.
Obama’s administration also spied on Fox News reporter James Rosen and covertly seized the personal and cell phone records of various Associated Press staff, the latter of which led to 50 news outlets sending a protest letter to then-Attorney General Eric Holder:
None of us can remember an instance where such an overreaching dragnet for newsgathering materials was deployed by the Department [of Justice …] The scope of this action calls into question the very integrity of the Department of Justice policies toward the press and its ability to balance, on its own, its police powers against the First Amendment rights of the news media and the public’s interest in reporting …
And need we review how the Biden administration pressured social media companies to comply with its wishes?
Hendershot seems like former New Yorker critic Pauline Kael who (in)famously said she knew but one person who voted for Richard Nixon in 1972 (despite him winning every single state except Massachusetts and Washington DC). But at least Kael noted she “lived in a rather special world.”
Kind of like academia, huh?
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