Firing Line host Margaret Hoover conducted a panel at the USC Center for the Political Future, taped January 30 and aired Friday. The episode was advertised as “The challenges for journalism in the age of Trump.”
Host Margaret Hoover: At a time when Americans’ trust in traditional news sources is at an all-time low, we explore the changing landscape of politics and journalism with three longtime professionals….
It sounds like a CNN show, not the original Firing Line show founded by conservative icon William F. Buckley.
New York Times national political reporter Adam Nagourney made some eye-opening comments about how his paper has covered Trump, why Pete Hegseth’s nomination should have died, and why people don’t want to talk to him anymore.
Hoover: Adam, take us in the newsroom of the New York Times. How is the newsroom grappling with covering Trump like any other candidate?
Nagourney: It goes back to 2016, I think Jonathan laid out a lot of the issues and problems. If you try to cover him traditionally, it doesn’t work, right? Because he does all this stuff that I think is designed to get attention, even if it’s not really that weighty. And it’s hard to know what to pay attention to and what to ignore. I think it’s easier to do that when he’s a candidate. I think when he’s president, there’s such institutional authority between what he’s saying that it’s really difficult. I think if you talk to people who were involved in 2016 when he ran against Hillary Clinton, we had trouble figuring it out. We had trouble figuring out the balance of how to cover him. I think it was better for us and everyone else in 2024. But it’s still there,,,,
A little 2016 campaign history: In August 2016, a notorious front-page article by the Times’ then-media columnist Jim Rutenberg urged the press to junk any attempt at impartiality to counter the campaign of the possible “demagogue” Trump. Nagourney continued on the difficulties of covering Trump.
Nagourney …Well, if you use the word “liar” or really strong words to describe him, and we deal with this every day, writing headlines, writing stories, I always fear that it will turn off readers who look at it and go, “There’s the liberal New York Times,” or liberal Politico or whatever, “We’re not gonna pay attention to it.” It’s a real problem. Do I think we’re better at it than we were in 2016? Yeah. Do I think we’ve cracked this nut? Absolutely not.
Nagourney broke in later by noting a “devastating story” by ultra-liberal journalist Jane Mayer in the New Yorker on now-Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and regretted that it had failed to crush Hegseth’s nomination because no one believes “organizations” like the New Yorker [Click “Expand” to read]..
Nagourney: I think a good example of that, The New Yorker magazine wrote a devastating story, in my opinion, about the now-Defense Secretary, with some of the original allegations about sexual assault, drinking. I read that story, I remember thinking, by Jane Mayer. ten years ago –
[graphic of New Yorker story onscreen]
Hoover: –I was quoted in that story.
Nagourney: –oh you were, ok? So I remember thinking when I read, you know, if this was ten years ago, or let’s just mention John Tower, right? He would have been dead, right, he would be dead. But I thought, you know what? I bet this isn’t going to bring him down. I mean it probably should have brought [Hegseth] down, ten years ago, it would’ve, but not anymore. And it just shows how — because people don’t care, people don’t believe what they’re reading in organizations like that.”
The media panel actually admitted that social media platforms helped the left for a long time, even helping elect Barack Obama, but now in the age of Elon they claim the right has the online advantage [Click “Expand” to read].
Hoover: Let me ask you this, at the dawn of, sort of, social media, and its intersection with political campaigns and national politics, the platforms were perceived to be structurally benefiting the Left. Right? Facebook helped elect President Obama. Today, the universe dynamic is totally different, right? X is, formerly Twitter, owned by Trump ally Elon Musk, who has a desk in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building across the street from the West Wing.
Shrum: And who fires people who had executive agencies.
Hoover: Mark Zuckerberg’s content moderation policy shifts at Meta and lack of fact-checking, all of this is seen, in many ways, as an effort to cozy up to the president. The Right now has the advantage.
The last question from Hoover was to Nagourney of the New York Times regarding how the “more hyper-partisan strain of media and politics influenced your reporting.”
Nagourney responded that “It makes it harder to report, because it makes it harder to get people to open up and not be confrontational, not be sort of as if they’re on television…I think it also makes them often less likely to trust the Times, right? Just assume the Times has a liberal bias, and therefore, I have a liberal bias. So it’s definitely more challenging. And it’s harder to sort of prepare a story, present it in a sort of objective, down-the-middle kind of way.”
For the record, Nagourney has never been in the habit of presenting news in an “objective, down the middle” way, not even in that blissful era before Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign.
Hat tip to Breitbart, who caught the full 38-minute show (not the truncated 26-minute edition that aired on PBS and which left out much of the media bias-related discussion above).
