by Richard King
The late Alexander Cockburn once suggested – mischievously, as was his wont – that the principal reason The New York Times published a “Corrections” column every morning was to convince its readers that everything else in the previous day's paper had been 100% true, morally as well as factually. In this way The Gray Lady maintained her reputation as America's premier clearing house for “All the News That's Fit to Print”: by reminding the world that she, too, was ever-so-slightly fallible.
Observing the meltdown in the US media in the weeks since Donald Trump became the GOP's man, it is hard not to think of Cockburn's zinger. Faced with the prospect of a President Trump – now highly unlikely, post-the Access Hollywood controversy – the media has moved from shock to repentance: Grub Street is jumping with journalists eager to take their share of the blame for the elevation of the Orange One. Nor, I think, are they wrong to do so, though the terms in which the mea culpas are currently being offered in the press manage both to miss the point and to highlight the very attitudes for which they should be apologetic. I'll get to those a little later. Suffice it to say, for now, that the media's self-flagellation in this instance smells strongly of self-aggrandisement.
The self-flagellation was discernible even before Trump's nomination. The New York Times' Jim Rutenberg, for example, suggested as long ago as May that the media was failing in its duty to voters, so wide of the mark had its predictions been. But it is only in the last few weeks that the sound of hats being dutifully chewed has yielded decisively to the rustle of sackcloth. Nicholas Kristof, also writing in the Times, struck an especially masochistic note: “Those of us in the news media have sometimes blamed Donald Trump's rise on the Republican Party's toxic manipulation of racial resentments over the years. But we should also acknowledge another force that empowered Trump: Us.”