Trump inspires best journalism in a generation
New York Times, Washington Post digging deep, says Andrew Cohen.
WASHINGTON No one has been better for the media than Donald Trump. The more he disdains, dismisses and disparages, the more it thrives.
It takes a perverse audacity — and a constitutional ignorance — for the president of the United States to call journalists “the enemy of the people.” For a strongman, though, facts are inconvenient.
No matter. Both the Washington Post and the New York Times report increases in readership since the election. In the fiercest competition between the papers since Watergate, they publish story after story on Trump, his family, his businesses, his associates.
They are covering the palace intrigue with verve and authority. The big story is the power struggle between Jared Kushner and Stephen Bannon. This is Trump’s White House as the court of Louis XIV at Versailles, with its own Cardinal Mazarin, Jean-Baptiste Colbert and, perhaps to come, the “Affair of the Poisons.”
Every week brings a keyhole account in one or both newspapers — sourced from off-the-record interviews with jealous insiders — over the battle for influence to become Trump’s Eminence Grise.
When the Pulitzer Prizes were announced Monday, it was poetic justice that the Post, which Trump has called “phoney” and “false and angry,” won one for its exhaustive investigation into his charitable contributions.
And that the Times, which Trump called “failing” and “dishonest,” won for its investigative series on Russia and cyber-power, including its impact on the U.S. presidential election. It was one of the Times’ three Pulitzers.
The work of both papers — as well as The Daily News, ProPublica, and others — is antidote to the natural pessimism that engulfs today’s media, particularly newspapers. All struggle to survive in the digital age, sustaining the excellence synonymous with the best journalists.
In recent weeks, two exemplars of the craft in the last generation died.
One was Charles Bartlett, a reporter with The Chattanooga Times, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1956 for a series of articles on a conflict of interest around Harold Talbott, U.S. Secretary of the Air Force. His revelations forced Talbott to resign.
Later, Bartlett became a syndicated columnist in a career extending 65 years. He was best known as a friend of John F. Kennedy, having famously introduced Kennedy to his future wife, Jacqueline, at a dinner party at his home in 1951.
What was striking to me about Bartlett was his aching honesty. When Kennedy was elected, Bartlett acted as confidant and adviser, providing JFK with a stream of advice in memos on everything from steel prices to diet to fashion.
When I spent a morning with Bartlett and his wife in the sprawling garden of their Georgetown home, he reflected on the tension he faced between his friendship and his profession. He put Kennedy first but noted his disappointment in the president’s personal life. Bartlett lacked a consuming professional ambition, which softened his edge.
At 92, he was gracious, poignant and imperturbable. Sadly, Bartlett never wrote a memoir.
The other was Stanley Dearman, who ran The Neshoba Democrat from 1966 to 2000. Dearman was based in Philadelphia, Mississippi, an awful town near where three young civil rights activists were murdered on June 21, 1964.
The murderers were acquitted in a subsequent trial, but Dearman refused to accept the miscarriage of justice. His struggle was captured in the film “Mississippi Burning.”
When I went to Mississippi to cover the reopening of the case in 1999, Dearman was my guide. He brought me to the clearing in the woods where the three were killed; the red soil looked as if it was bleeding.
He considered it his duty to keep the case alive.
There was a steely passion about Dearman. He never won a Pulitzer. But 41 years later, the case was re-tried and the killer convicted to life imprisonment, pointedly, on June 21, 2005. Dearman had his reward — and the applause of journalists everywhere.