On Friday’s “PBS NewsHour,” The Atlantic Staff Writer David Brooks said that people in the media “play it straight. We do our job,” but attacking President Donald Trump has “become the business model.” And while Trump was wrong to bar certain outlets from the White House, those in the media must “reestablish some distance from the Democratic Party.”
Brooks began by saying that Trump would “love to have a state-controlled press in this country…and Jonathan mentioned, it’s our house. It’s not his house. And so the public should have a right to choose. And then, most importantly, this is a democracy. You have to have some respect for the people. And if people want to watch MS NOW or CNN or anybody else, and you want to talk to the people, you’ve got to have those outlets. And so, it’s just ridiculous and outrageous that he would ban these places.”
He then said, “But if I could vent one pet peeve about us: Starting in 2015, we, in the mainstream media, learned that, if you bash Donald Trump, the clicks go up, the ratings go up. It became the business model. And I’m not saying we’re — we play it straight. We do our job, but it’s become the business model.”
Brooks added, “And I get — we get to go, or at least — to dinners, sometimes off-the-record dinners between journalists, columnists, and politicians. And I would say, over the last two years, it used to be, when you were at a dinner, an off-the-record dinner with a Democratic politician, there was distance between the journalists and the Democrats, because they’re politicians. Our job is to keep some distance. In my view, at many places, and at many of the dinners I have been to, there’s no distance anymore. And that is a problem for the media. And that is our problem. We’ve got to reestablish some distance from the Democratic Party. These are people we cover. They’re not people we root for. They’re not people we’re spin doctors for. They’re people we cover. And I do think we have done a not ultimately excellent job at maintaining as much distance from the Democrats as we keep from the Republicans.”
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