The “Fourth Estate" has always played a major role in influencing U.S. policy and opinion, but like other major institutions, it is not beyond reproach. Widely criticized for its complacency in the run up to the Iraq War, the media has also been criticized more recently for being too ready to publish sensitive information. Modern media is anything but monolithic, and competitive pressures and a rapid news cycle have forced many news agencies to exercise even less restraint.
Latest in Media Criticism
What explains the general lack of interest in the Afghanistan Papers? Why didn’t this trove of declassified documents catch fire like the Pentagon Papers during Vietnam?
The CIA should be held accountable for its mistakes, but it’s important to stick to the facts when doing so.
Nine questions for Charles Brandt.
Amid the hubbub of L’Affaire Ukrainienne, you could be forgiven for overlooking another story that has emerged out of Congress over the past week. It’s a grubby, unpleasant story—so much so that it feels ugly to draw attention to it. But the times are ugly, after all, and the story is a concerning harbinger of what might be to come in the lead-up to 2020.
The press screwed up bigly on the Barr letter. Here are nine ideas for doing better the second time around.
On Sept. 5, the New York Times published an anonymous op-ed by a “senior official in the Trump administration,” calling into question the president’s fitness for office. The author, call him or her Anonymous, does not mention impeachment, but does speak about another constitutional process: the 25th Amendment, which provides for the removal of an incapacitated president, and which Anonymous dismisses as an overly “complex” process that might precipitate "constitutional crisis."
In “'Okay, Let’s Go': Watching the New York Times on Trump” Benjamin Wittes largely extols Liz Garbus’s new documentary series, "The Fourth Estate" which chronicles the New York Times in the Trump era.
Liz Garbus’s new documentary series, “The Fourth Estate,” opens with Donald Trump taking the oath of office on January 20, 2017, but it doesn’t linger long on the new president. After a few seconds of him repeating the words of Chief Justice John Roberts, it cuts to a cityscape of New York, then to the New York Times building, then to the newsroom, where a group of Times reporters and editors are watching the inauguration on television. The paper’s executive editor, Dean Baquet, is leaning back in a chair, his hands pressed together.
That’s the remarkable claim purveyed this morning in a New York Times editorial. Here is the relevant passage:
You may be forgiven for having missed Thomas Baker op-ed, “What Went Wrong at the FBI,” published in the Wall Street Journal on March 19. Eminently forgettable in its own right, the piece is worth noting because, in at least two ways, it highlights how much has changed since Donald Trump took office.