Journalists and editors in the mainstream media, who suffered numerous instances of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris refusing to make themselves available for interviews and press conferences during the last four years, will face a similar tumult during the next administration in the form of criminal subpoenas, investigations, and prosecutions from federal law enforcement if President-Elect Trump takes exception to the content of their stories, Rolling Stone reports.
“Oh, it’ll be brutal. Gloves off. We’ve learned our lessons from the first time and one lesson is you have got to be even more aggressive,” says a conservative lawyer close to the president-elect’s team, which will be a huge challenge to a press already reeling from when Harris ignored a Fox News reporter’s question about immigration policy while she was walking on an airport tarmac.
“Among committed Trumpists close to the president-elect, there has also been discussion of potentially creating new offices in the FBI or DOJ to focus exclusively on hunting for leaks and plugging the deluge of media leaks,” Rolling Stone writes, which echoes when Pod Save America host Dan Pfeiffer wrote in March that the New York Times and other top outlets hold “Trump and Biden to two different standards and are often too worried about seeming balanced to truly articulate the danger of Trump. Many online Democrats are too hard on the Times… The problems with the New York Times are endemic to most traditional political media. They have not figured out how to adjust their models and culture to cover someone like Trump,” an attack that Times editor Joe Kahn took very personally, telling Semafor that it’s not their job to help preserve a free press.
While the road ahead looks tough for reporters and other media figures drained by constant battles with the Biden Administration, the press corps knows how to handle the bumps. Whether it’s Karrine Jean Pierre stonewalling on questions about why Kamala Harris appeared to change her accent depending on whether she was talking to a crowd of Black voters or Kash Patel sending FBI agents to kick down the door of a Maryland townhouse and point a taser at a 13 year-old kid, screaming at him to get down on the floor because his mom wrote a Politico story quoting anonymous sources, the mainstream media will keep speaking truth to power, except in jail where they won’t have wifi.
National Zero will resume our regular coverage after MSM-ifying the coming tribulations. We hope Chuck Todd approves and wish him luck in being cavity searched and de-loused at the DC lockup.