Bob Woodward, an esteemed journalist for the Washington Post, is quoted in a story from The Hill, declaring “Mr. President, the media is not fake news”. Part of me can sympathize with Bob Woodard. He is a storied journalist with a rock solid reputation of calling the shots as he sees them. His remarks come at a time when President Trump still casts disparaging blanket remarks on the press on a frequent basis. It’s as though the press and Trump are dealing with separate realities and cannot come to an agreement on what is news. In this equation, I think Bob Woodward is addressing the wrong problem.
Trump is a known quantity. Trump is sloppy with facts, rife with bias, boast, and sometimes mistaken belief. And yet, his bias against the media is not unjustified. They cherry pick his obvious errors – often time petty, demagogue far-flung extrapolations of his remarks as though they were his, and conveniently bury much that could be construed as favorable. From this chaotic activity comes the charge of fake-news.
Enter Bob Woodward. I have no doubt Mr. Woodward is the superior intellect in this circumstance. Yet, having covered eight prior Presidents during his career, he of all professional journalists should know how to weight a President’s remarks and should understand that not all Presidential flaws carry the same consequence. In fact, all eight Presidents he’s covered had/have them. Instead of focusing on The President’s knackered perception of a highly fluid, controversial concept – fake news, he really should be looking at how his own house has contributed to Trump’s justified criticism. Forget left leaning journalism (i.e. Salon, MSNBC, CNN, etc) for a moment and just look at the two heavyweights of traditional news, Washington Post and the New York Times; they inject an onslaught of editorial headlines and stories onto their front page. There is little to no division between their news desk and their editorial office. Both are legitimate, but mix the two and they just prove Trump correct when he cited fake news.
Of all the journalist that should be aware of the nuances surrounding the much politicized concept of fake news, Bob Woodward should not be offering his own counter-blanket pronouncements. After all, he is the news man in this equation. You don’t have to sit at an editorial desk to realize that when Trump says ‘fake-news’, he’s addressing a spectrum of press behaviors, some of which are clearly deserving of the moniker.
