Remember when Trump became president and he was making noise about not letting certain people have credentials to get into the White House? And there was this big hoo and cry like, “Oh my God! He’s not going to let us into the White House!”
And my first reaction to that was: who fucking cares — you know — if you’re not let into the White House? You have an adversarial relationship already — you’re supposed to — with government. Right? If they don’t let you in, just report on it anyway. You know? It’s not a big deal.
But for the new generation of journalists who have come in — they imagine themselves, because they’re socially the same people that they’re reporting on, they hang out in the same circles, they go to the same parties — the idea of not being let behind the rope line is an atrocity to them. They don’t understand it. And they see their role as helping explain the point of view of power. I mean it’s just what we were talking about with Brian Stelter before. Like, my job here is to kind of sell this to the population.
Whereas, the old school journalists were not like that. They saw their role as, “Yeah, you know, we’re patriotic. You know? Like, we love our country, and if it does the right thing, we’ll report that, but if it fucks up we’ve got to report that, too. Our job is to ask difficult questions, and if we have got difficult truths we’ve got to report those things. And so we’re not really on your side.” Like, we’re not your friends. You know? You can hang out with us. We can hang out with you at a campaign stop, but there’s supposed to be tension there. There’s always supposed to be tension there.
What you saw now is that there’s no tension at all. Right? Like, there’s just this sort of seamless community of people who all think the same way. Where it’s Rachel Maddow or Don Lemon or whoever it is or some Biden administration official. Like, they’re all kind of on the same page. They see themselves as part of the same group. They see themselves as having the same mission. But the press, the press has to have its own mission, or else it’s not legitimate.
Matt Taibi