Op-Ed: The pandemic, Hurricane Ian and me — a doctor whose friends say I have PTSD
This summer, President Trump called the New York Times and the Washington Post fake news and attacked a reporter for not publishing the sources of certain anonymous and unvetted information. He did so because it’s what his supporters want to hear, according to the president’s personal lawyer and former White House counsel, Michael Cohen. The president’s attack on the American press, which Cohen’s role in has caused him to publicly admit he’s helped fuel, was in no way political, in part because the media is the enemy of his own base.
But on the other hand, the New York Times reported on the president’s long, ongoing feud with the newspaper. The feud is over the paper’s coverage of his feud with the Times. Specifically, the feud is over coverage of the president’s feud with the Times. And the paper’s coverage of the president’s feud with the Times is why the president calls the newspaper fake news and wants Cohen to help Trump fight the paper.
It makes sense.
While the Times, the Post and other media outlets have covered Trump’s feud with Cohen, the paper has not reported on that feud. The president has told his base to avoid news outlets like the Times, which he says have him wronged and to instead read the Post, which he says is “fair and balanced.”
The Times, meanwhile, has covered Trump’s feud with Cohen — as well as his feud with the other New York Times reporters in his circle, the ones who wrote about the Times he called fake news. In fact, the Times’ own reporters — including the paper’s former senior Washington editor, Maggie Haberman — have gone to great lengths in their reporting to show that the paper’s coverage of the president’s feud with Cohen was far from fair or balanced.
And Haberman’s reporting led to an explosion of coverage in Washington and elsewhere that led the president and his allies to call Haberman’s reporting “fake news” — a charge Haberman has pushed back against