Evan Thomas Quotes
Well, our job is to bash the President, that's what we do almost …
Evan Thomas, Historian & Journalist, Inside Washington, February 6, 2007
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
He was responding to criticism that the media was bashing the President.
Otehr members of the Trump staff then started to echo the notion and it became common in Trumpian circles.
Ailes suggested plan was not implemented by President Nixon. However. Ailes, an arch conservative who has always believed the media was biased against conservatism, later implemented his idea very successfully. This idea was the intellectual forerunner" to Fox News, which Ailes launched as a "fair and balanced" news network in 1996. The Nixon Administration however, concerned about the extremes of many of his recommendations finally fired him, which turned out to be very positive for Ailes career thereafter.
Hoover was asked if he would take oral questions.
The story had been placed by Republican dirty tricksters throughout the press. Reston, then the editor of the New York Times, was totally uninterested in whether or not the story was true. He, in contrast to some other NYT staff was not a JFK enthusiast in general. but saw such material as not news and certainly not “fit to print.”—the newspaper’s oldest journalistic standard He removed the reporter from the assignment but in such a climate, it is easy to see in retrospect why the JFK sex scandals were not covered by the press.
Until the 20th century almost all American political media were shamelessly and overtly biased—left or right. Political Parties had their own de facto publications much like Fox News became for the Republicans in the 21st century. In the 20th century journalism developed into a profession that evolved standards of objectivity in reporting. That norm then prevailed for about 70 years. With the extreme polarization of the later years of the 29th Century the right wing began to accuse much of the media of a left wing bias, and the media tended to react as Krugman describes in this quotation. The model of having spokespersons for “each side” of an issue works for highly subjective political preferences with a two party system, but where it broke down is with scientific and technical issues. On these, there often really are not two scientific points of view, but there is a scientific consensus of the vast majority of scientists and almost all the prestigious and accomplished scientists are in accord. However, there may be some who have a cultural, religious and/or political concern for some science and its implications for society. They in turn find a scientist or two, often one who is unaccomplished and not recognized in the scientific field to argue a different point of view. The media have tended to equate the two and have a “debate” as if there were two sides to the science when there are not. These issues tend to cluster around scientific medical issues involving sex and birth control methods, environment and conservation, evolution, the age of the earth and the method of creation of the universe. The problem is particularly exacerbated by the general scientific illiteracy of the American population and the relatively few journalists who themselves are scientifically literate who can explain scientific issues well.
Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell had written exposes of business misconduct and lax government enforcement of laws. Politicians and business leaders were outraged and wanted something done to prevent this embarrassment and the riling up of the voting public. The President, a reformer himself, and a personal friend of Lincoln Steffens, took what seemed like a middle ground, where the government would not interfere with the 1st Amendment rights of the Journalists provided they did not go too far. But of course everyone had a different idea of “when to stop” so there never was a practical limit.
Evan Welling Thomas III is an American journalist, historian, and author. He is the author of nine books, including two New York Times bestsellers.
