@snood,
Quote:It just seems like that there was a time when reporters/journalists didn't have to be so careful about being combative. Hell, if a few interviewers had just been hard-nosed early on in Trump's run about not taking bullshit for an answer, it might've made a big difference.
Combative is definitely fine and often necessary. Trump has been a unique case because of the amount of blatant lying he does and the media had few tools or precedents to deal with this. It has taken them a while to figure out how to deal professionally with this guy and his style.
But consider too that Trump's opponents in the primary had the same problem and none of them got it right. Because news entities (the ones with integrity) have certain professional standards to try and maintain, this hasn't been easy to cope with properly.
That said, the news media came into all this with certain deficiencies that have not been helpful - most particularly the "he said" versus "she said" habits (as in, "some say the world is round, others disagree". That's the failure of presuming that objectivity means stenography. What they were trying to do was to present themselves as free of bias (after decades of the right bullying them with the "liberal media" charge). But where one side takes advantage of that media habit of thought, the media can be and has been quite often successfully relegated to a stenographer role where they have sought to maintain "equivalence" in coverage and commentary. To really get a good grasp of these problems, I recommend you turn to Jay Rosen at his PressThink blog.
One of the positive consequences of Trump is that he's really forced media to drop some of those old ways of thinking because the problems inherent in them for good and responsible journalism seeking to properly inform citizens have become acutely evident with Trump.
