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
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.
Last Friday, President Trump signed into law the Taiwan Travel Act, which makes it a U.S. policy to allow high-level meetings between Taiwan and U.S. government officials. News reports about the law have often described it as “non-binding.” This “not legally binding” view is widely shared, including by China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. But this reading is not quite right.
No sooner did the internet ink dry on my analysis of Andrew C.
An expose in Politico by Josh Meyer entitled “The secret backstory of how the Obama administration let Hezbollah off the hook” makes a damning charge: “In its determination to secure a nuclear deal with Iran, the Obama administration derailed an ambitious law enforcement campaign targeting drug trafficking by the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah.” Beyond securing a nuclear deal, the article argues, some Obama administration officials—including John Brennan, the CIA director wh
A recent New York Times story regarding the draft Nuclear Posture Review said:
A newly drafted United States nuclear strategy that has been sent to President Trump for approval would permit the use of nuclear weapons to respond to a wide range of devastating but non-nuclear attacks on American infrastructure, including what current and former government officials described as the most crippling kind of cyberattacks.