Three Disturbing Signs of Fourth Estate Failure
Corporate executives behaving obsequiously towards Donald Trump and his lackeys may be disturbing to witness, but it is squarely within their primary charge of increasing shareholder value. Sucking up to a transactional president who uses power to reward friends and punish enemies may help with the bottom line.
Obsequious journalists, however, are not fulfilling their duties. They are undermining the load-bearing pillars of the Fourth Estate.
We are barely into the second Trump administration, and we are seeing prominent journalists rewriting history and, in some cases, rationalizing the president’s anti-constitutional tendencies. Here are three unsettling examples.
David Marchese, co-host of The New York Times’s podcast The Interview, conducted a friendly chat with a pro-dictatorship political theorist, Curtis Yarvin, whom Vice President J.D. Vance once cited to argue in favor of a purge of civil servants. This is not a mischaracterization of Yarvin’s views.
Marchese asked, “Why is democracy so bad, and why would having a dictator solve the problem?” Yarvin replied by arguing Franklin D. Roosevelt operated as a dictator: “Just read the last 10 paragraphs of F.D.R.’s first inaugural address, in which he essentially says: ‘Hey, Congress, give me absolute power, or I’ll take it anyway.’ So did F.D.R. actually take that level of power? Yeah, he did.”
The problem with Yarvin’s response is that Roosevelt, upon becoming president in the depths of the Great Depression, did not “essentially” take power against the will of Congress or threaten as much. He merely raised the possibility of asking Congress to give him emergency powers if the legislative process ran aground:
It is to be hoped that the normal balance of executive and legislative authority may be wholly adequate to meet the unprecedented task before us. But it may be that an unprecedented demand and need for undelayed action may call for temporary departure from that normal balance of public procedure.
I am prepared under my constitutional duty to recommend the measures that a stricken nation in the midst of a stricken world may require. These measures, or such other measures as the Congress may build out of its experience and wisdom, I shall seek, within my constitutional authority, to bring to speedy adoption.
But in the event that the Congress shall fail to take one of these two courses, and in the event that the national emergency is still critical, I shall not evade the clear course of duty that will then confront me. I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis–broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.
The problem with Marchese’s response to Yarvin’s falsehood is that there wasn’t one, even though Marchese’s bio page pledges, “Every aspect of my interviews is rigorously fact-checked to make sure that no meanings have been changed and no context has been shifted or altered.” Interview subjects should not have license to misinform New York Times readers about history, especially advocates of dictatorship who are trying to turn America against democracy. A podcaster is a journalist, and a journalist should correct factual errors, not amplify them.
Over at Politico, John Harris, its founding editor and columnist, argued on Tuesday that Trump’s critics should accept that the returning president is “the greatest American figure of his era.” To be fair, Harris is not using “great” to mean praiseworthy but as “an objective description about the dimensions of his record.”
But then Harris defines that record weirdly: “He began a decade ago by dominating the Republican Party. He soon advanced to dominating every discussion of American politics broadly … He is someone with an ability to perceive opportunities that most politicians do not and forge powerful, sustained connections with large swaths of people in ways that no contemporary can match. In other words: He is a force of history.”
This is not wrong, but he is really only telling us that Trump is attended by a cult of personality and can (sometimes) narrowly win elections. Nothing in this summation of Trump’s record includes his governing record, which is pretty thin (as the Washington Monthly assessed last year). Generally, we judge presidents by what they did. In Trump’s first term, which ended in electoral defeat, he failed to enact most of his legislative priorities. Many of his executive actions were stymied by the judiciary. His past failures should inform coverage of this week’s executive order blitzkrieg, which, after the lawsuits are adjudicated, may also prove to be not so great.
Harris is a typically insightful analyst who once observed that part of Trump’s “legacy” is how “casual savagery” is “now part of the everyday diet of American political life.” Seemingly caught up in the inaugural moment, Harris recast that savagery as evidence of historical greatness simply because it worked on Election Day.
Scolding Trump’s critics to accept Trump’s greatness on such flimsy grounds is not persuasive and it is not holding the president accountable. One can acknowledge the septuagenarian’s stunning comeback from his 2020 electoral defeat and failed insurrection to reclaim the presidency without using language infused with idolatry.
Expectations for Fourth Estate rigor ought to run low when reading The Wall Street Journal opinion page, yet I expect from the page a principled commitment to laissez-faire capitalism. I don’t expect support for a partnering of the executive branch with a submissive crew of oligarchs.
Nevertheless, here’s the Journal’s Editor at Large, Gerard Baker:
The call for Americans to “act with courage, vigor and the vitality of history’s greatest civilization” was a welcome affirmation of the nation’s exceptionalism after depressing years of national self-abasement.
But the president this time will need an administration fully committed to that goal—and that’s where the oligarchy comes in.
Marveling at the inaugural scene, Baker writes:
…up there on the platform in the toasty confines of the Capital [sic] Rotunda, was the new oligarchy that Joe Biden had warned us about in his final attempt at cogency last week: Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos. The dangerous men of means who write the algorithms on our phones and now, we are told, the legislation on our statute books and the rules on our executive orders. Bring it on, I say.
The problem with the oligarchy warning isn’t primarily that we are being asked to believe that we are about to deprave the pristine democracy Mr. Biden has bequeathed us with craven submission to a small group of rich men. It’s that we have had an oligarchy for years and it’s been the wrong one. If we are to succumb to the rule of oligarchs, we can at least hope they might do a better job than the last crowd.
The members of the “last crowd” of oligarchs aren’t named at all because they don’t exist. But peddling the fiction that we already had an oligarchy—perpetrating “borderless globalism, environmental eschatology and puritan wokery”—is designed to allay concerns about the “new oligarchy” and its agenda. Also intended to soothe is Baker’s just-kidding line towards the end: “I exaggerate about American oligarchy of course.” But the thesis of the column is clear. Baker is happy that a small group of billionaires that own technology platforms—and have massive conflicts of interest never acknowledged by Baker—are now intertwined with the president and helping to “rule” the country. That they became plutocrats in large part through government largesse—green-energy subsidies that accrued to Elon Musk, massive federal contracts to Bezos’s Amazon Web Services, and so on—might arouse the ire of Baker and the Journal op-ed page had they stood astride the stage at a Democratic inaugural. As disturbing as these examples are, we should not conclude the media have become stenographers. The New York Times editorial board just lambasted Trump’s pardons for the January 6 insurrectionists, and Harris’s Politico ran a smart column warning about the likelihood the pardoned insurrectionists will commit violent crimes anew.
Even The Wall Street Journal editorial board was hopping mad at Trump’s brazen disregard of the rule of law, although the target of their ire was the executive order keeping TikTok in business. In words designed to hit Trump where it hurts, the Journal dubbed the order a form of “illegal amnesty,” which signals that Trump “puts pleasing China’s Xi Jinping above a law passed by Congress.”
The Fourth Estate isn’t dead. But the media’s Overton Window has shifted toward Trump deference to the point where oligarchy is welcomed, and history is rewritten to justify its arrival.
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