Here’s a novel idea in our polarized political culture: Two things can be true at the same time.
Donald Trump can be wrong to punish news organizations whose coverage he doesn’t like. And those same news organizations can be guilty of exactly what the president accuses them of — treating him unfairly.
You don’t have to choose sides. You don’t have to join Team Trump or Team Media. You can believe in a free press without pretending the press is always fair. And you can believe much of the coverage of Donald Trump is biased without believing a president gets to decide which journalists are allowed through the White House gates.
That shouldn’t be complicated. Somehow, these days, it is.
President Trump banned CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House, accusing them of spreading “FAKE NEWS.” He said the action wasn’t an assault on the free press, which he claimed he cherishes, but an assault on fake news — something he described as “corrupt, purposeful, pervasive” and a threat to national security.
That’s Trump being Trump. He doesn’t merely criticize. He goes nuclear.
But there’s a much more important issue here than presidential hyperbole. The government doesn’t get to punish news organizations because the president doesn’t like what they report or how they report it. And now a federal judge has temporarily blocked the ban and ordered the White House to restore access to the three organizations.
That’s as it should be. A president doesn’t get to hand out constitutional protections only to journalists who treat him nicely. A free press has to be free to criticize the president — even if it’s unfairly.
And that brings us to the part of this story that much of the mainstream press would rather not talk about.
CNN and MS NOW — I’m leaving Politico out of this because I don’t follow it closely enough to make a judgment — really are relentlessly negative in their coverage of Donald Trump.
That doesn’t mean they routinely get their facts wrong. But journalism can be factually accurate and still be unfair.
Bias isn’t only about putting something on the air that isn’t true. It’s also about what stories get covered and which ones don’t. It’s about which guests get invited on, which questions get asked, how much time is devoted to a controversy, and whether one side gets an open microphone while the other side is barely heard from.
Watch CNN or MS NOW for any length of time and you’ll see plenty of Democratic members of Congress invited on to tell viewers what’s wrong with Donald Trump — while liberal journalists sit there like potted plants. But, yes, Presidents deserve scrutiny, and Trump supplies journalists with plenty to scrutinize.
But where’s the balance?
When Trump does something these networks believe is wrong — and, yes, a lot of the time they have a legitimate case — they play it big. When he does something that might reflect well on him, the enthusiasm for saturation coverage has a funny way of disappearing. So they downplay, or flat-out ignore, news that makes the president look good.
Is that illegal? No.
Is it journalism at its best? I don’t think so.
And this is where both sides could benefit from a little self-examination.
Donald Trump would be better off if he weren’t so thin-skinned. Presidents have enormous power. Journalists don’t work for them, and criticism comes with the job. Trying to use government power to stifle unfavorable coverage isn’t how a free country is supposed to operate.
But journalists might also benefit from climbing down from the moral high ground every once in a while.
Whenever conservatives complain about liberal media bias, too many journalists react as if the accusation itself is ridiculous — just another right-wing grievance dreamed up by people who don’t appreciate courageous journalism.
Maybe instead of automatically circling the wagons, they could ask an uncomfortable question: Is there anything to the criticism?
There often is.
What I find especially galling is the sanctimony of CNN, a news operation that can suffocate you with its self-importance. CNN ran story after story on the ban but refused to acknowledge its role — that of partisan player, one that routinely downplays Democratic failures — like Joe Biden’s disastrous open border policy — while playing up anything and everything his successor has done wrong.
Bias against Republicans isn’t a figment of the conservative imagination. Still, that doesn’t mean every journalist is a Democratic operative with a press pass — even though more than a few act as if they were. It doesn’t mean negative stories about Trump are necessarily wrong. And it certainly doesn’t give a president the right to retaliate against news organizations.
It means something much simpler: Journalists are human beings. They have blind spots. They have political and cultural assumptions. And when enough people in the same profession share those assumptions, bias can become so routine that the people practicing it don’t even recognize it as bias. And yes, some journalists just plain loathe this president and don’t care if they’re fair or not.
But journalists aren’t the only ones with blind spots. Despite what his critics may think, Trump is human too. So he wants to get even with his perceived enemies — and his answer is to punish the press.
The press’s answer too often is to pretend there’s nothing about itself worth criticizing.
Neither response inspires much confidence.
A president who respects the First Amendment should tolerate journalism he considers unfair. And journalists who expect the public to trust them should be willing to ask whether, sometimes, the president has a point.
Both things can be true at the same time.