A Changing Media in the Trump Era

H as the press lost its objectivity? Is news reporting dead? And have readers lost their nose to sniff out biased reporting?

Liberal media analyst and Trump critic Jay Rosen recently opined that political journalists in the United States are now operating under a “conflict” in their “code” because of a president who is “wholly unfit for the job.” For instance Rosen says Trump “isn’t good at anything a president has to do” and “nothing he says can be trusted.” Therefore says Rosen who is a professor of journalism at New York University reporters are in conflict when they must professionally report on the president’s dealings. “If nothing the president says can be trusted reporting what the president says becomes absurd ” he wrote in September on his blog site pressthink.org. “You can still do it but it’s hard to respect what you are doing.” He concludes that reporters have come to resolve this conflict by “revising” their work a bit to turn it into “something that they can respect.”

Using Rosen’s thesis as a starting point I moderated a panel discussion last week at the American Jewish Press Association conference in Los Angeles on the president and the press. With me were two journalists from the right and left: Joel Pollak editor-at-large at the Breitbart News and Juliet Lapidos editor of the op-ed page at the Los Angeles Times.

Professional Bias

I asked them first whether they believed objectivity in the press expired during the 2016 election campaign and the election of Donald Trump.