https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/after-a-stunning-news-conference-theres-a-newly-crucial-job-for-the-american-press/2018/07/16/720a7c64-891b-11e8-a345-a1bf7847b375_story.html
A hard hitting perspective on how the media should handle this. hint, not like they've done in the past
When it comes to Fox and Trump, the answer to the lyric “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” is abundantly obvious.
But for the reality-based press, the job will require clarity and moral force, in ways we’re not always all that comfortable with.
Just as it took months to come to terms with referring to Trump’s endless falsehoods (when they are clearly intentional) as “lies,” we need to get out of our ingrained habits in order to tell this story clearly.
Some signs were encouraging. In The Post, Aaron Blake’s analysis told it plainly: “Trump’s news conference with Putin was everything Putin could have dreamed” read the headline.
The lead headline on the Guardian US website got right to the point, too: “Trump ‘treasonous’ after siding with Putin on election meddling.”
But the press’s default position is to normalize, to represent various points of view with equal weight, to be swayed by the pomp of the presidential office. To act as if everything is just a variation on a theme — something we’ve seen before but maybe in a slightly paler shade.
That’s not good enough.