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President Donald Trump and Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross in Washington, D.C., July 11. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

Tim Graham / @TimJGraham

Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org.

The anti-Trump media elites are relentlessly omnidirectional in attacking their target. One day, they’ll complain the president’s too intolerably present in the limelight. But the next day, he’s scandalously inaccessible. When the Trump administration launched its offensive on Iran, they made noise about it being too quiet.

CNN correspondent Alayna Treene tweeted: “No senior Trump officials appeared on the Sunday shows today—not only rare but especially notable given many administration officials recognize the steep task they have in explaining the reasoning behind, and the overall objective, of the Iranian attacks to the American public.”

That’s interesting, since CNN demonstrates hourly that it’s devoted to the “steep task” of helping the Democrats defeat Trump. CNN repeatedly put on Rep. Jason Crow, D-Colo., ripping the president as a “five-time draft dodger,” without any pushback like this: Since former President Joe Biden received five draft deferments during the Vietnam war, is he a “draft dodger”?

Team Trump made a strategic decision to forgo the Sunday shows, perhaps in anticipation of how aggressively the so-called moderators would seek to present the Iran effort as a dramatic failure before the weekend was even finished.

Nevertheless, Trump granted a series of brief one-on-one interviews with ABC, NBC, CNN, MS NOW, Fox News, Politico, The Atlantic, Axios, the New York Post, The Washington Free Beacon, the Washington Reporter, London’s Daily Mail, and Israel’s Channel 14 News.

When that blitz was over, did Trump get credit for being accessible? Of course not. Democracy was still dying in darkness, as The Washington Post assigned media reporters Scott Nover and Liam Scott to explain how this was somehow sneakily anti-press behavior.

They turned to former CNN reporter (and now journalism professor) Mark Feldstein to lament that this was an opportunity to “relay his talking points without being subjected to a cross-examination.” Access to Trump isn’t enough. He must be antagonized until he says something that can be used against him in the court of public opinion.

“It’s impossible for news outlets to resist playing up the immediacy of an exclusive interview with a president in the midst of battle, no matter how pedestrian his comments may be,” Feldstein lectured. “This tactic allows Trump to be everywhere all at once, without the formality of an Oval Office address or the pushback of obstreperous questions at a news conference.”

Feldstein and his Washington Post promoters want those “obstreperous questions” on national television. This allows reporters to pose as anti-Trump protesters with notepads, where they are the heroic center of the story.

Now contrast this to the way the elitist media pampered Biden and tolerated his perpetual hiding from press conferences and interviews. Democracy wasn’t dying in darkness as Biden’s handlers spent four years keeping him from being “subject to cross-examination” with “obstreperous questions at a news conference.”

When there was a presser, many journalists cooperated in suggesting their questions in advance, so Biden could be handed note cards with the picture of the reporter and their name. That wasn’t obstreperous or noteworthy at all.

The public should expect journalists to ask firm but fair questions of all presidents. That’s not what happens. Questions are pitched to undergird narratives, and for Trump, that narrative is typically hyper-negative, to imply Trump’s only engaged in “demolition,” as one Politico editor put it. In their world, Trump’s every policy move is damaging, and his every utterance makes him look incompetent.

This is why the Pew Research Center recently found 57% of respondents expressed little or zero confidence in journalists to act in the best interests of the public. They act in their own narrow interests.

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