Media critic: President Has Upended US Journalism

A new study reveals the degree to which Trump has “demolished . . . the norms of American journalism,” fundamentally altering “the way in which the press does its job,” reports Peter Boyer in The Weekly Standard. The Pew Research Center found that journalists no longer “maintain a distanced objectivity” but “now increasingly consider themselves at liberty to directly refute the president or representatives of his administration.” They’ve also become “strikingly self-referential”: The secondmost-commonly used source in stories is now “another news organization or journalist.” And their focus overwhelmingly is on Trump’s personality rather than his agenda. Pew doesn’t claim to detect bias, but “it didn’t really need to. The coverage speaks for itself.”