Every so often I see a ‘let’s cut off our noses to spite our faces’ plan, and it looks to me as though Jim Friedlich, the CEO and executive director of the Leftist Lenfest Institute for Journalism, the nonprofit organization that owns what I have frequently called The Philadelphia Enquirer,^[1]RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt. has come up with one.

Amid intensifying assaults on the press, is it time for a ‘NATO for news’?

To protect the free press in America, we need to agree that “an attack on one is an attack on all.”

by Jim Friedlich | Monday, February 17, 2025 | 5:02 AM EST

On Aug. 11, 2023, police in Marion, Kan. — population 2,000 — raided the offices of the local newspaper, the Marion County Record, as well as the family home of its publisher, Eric Meyer.

The Record’s reporters had been looking into allegations of misconduct on the part of the police chief who led the raid. Meyer’s 98-year-old mother, Joan Meyer, was present while the chief’s officers rifled through the home. She died the following day.

There follow paragraphs telling us how horrible this was, and how it made national news coverage. But Mr Friedlich’s bomb, “She died the following day,” is meant to imply that the elderly Mrs Meyer died because of the raid. Without some documentation that the raod did cause her death, Mr Friedlich has committed one of the most common of logical fallacies, post hoc ergo propter hoc, that because Y followed X, it was caused by X. Are we to believe that Mr Friedlich, who has been a professional in journalism since 1990, didn’t know what he was doing when he wrote that statement?

Defending the rights of an independent free press — the only profession enshrined in the U.S. Constitution — is indeed an act of patriotism. Our nation could sure use more of that kind of patriotic spirit on Presidents Day of 2025. Not only is our new president intensifying his assaults on the press, the American news media have so far seemed curiously flat-footed and uncoordinated in their response.

The credentialed media just love to claim that their profession is “enshrined in the U.S. Constitution,” but is it really? Or is it simply that the First Amendment is protecting the freedom of speech that isn’t actually spoken aloud, but printed on paper, as the authors would have seen it, or digitally as things are today?

President Donald Trump has taken aim at CBS News in a case accusing the network of manipulative editing of a 60 Minutes interview of Kamala Harris, almost certainly within the network’s First Amendment rights.

Did you notice it? Mr Trump has accused CBS News of “manipulative editing”, meaning editing an interview of then Vice President Kamala Harris Emhoff to make her appear a better choice for election, and Mr Friedlich told readers that such was “almost certainly within the network’s First Amendment rights.” He didn’t say that the editing wasn’t “manipulative,” or that the editing wasn’t intended to create a false impression of Mrs Emhoff as a better candidate, but simply that such journolism was protected speech.

In that, he’s correct: it was protected freedom of speech and of the press. But it strains the credulity of actual journalism, which is why I so frequently refer to journolism, as defined in the box above. Attacks on the credibility of journalists are enabled by the fact that so many (purported) journalists are not reporters, but special pleaders, “Democrats with bylines” in Robert Stacy McCain’s formulation. #FakeNews took off as a Twitter hashtag precisely because the credentialed media were mixing real news with leftward-oriented propaganda.

The proximate cause of Mr Friedlich’s ire was that President Trump’s minions banned the Associated Press reporters from some events, for an admittedly silly reason. But Mr Friedlich’s ‘solution’ is even sillier:

In the Associated Press case, for example, what would happen if the AP’s erstwhile competitors, including Reuters, CNN, the Washington Post, and the New York Times, refused to attend similar White House events unless and until the AP’s access is restored?

This collective action would leave the White House speaking only to media properties like Fox News, OAN, and Newsmax, favored only by its base. The loss of a larger megaphone would damage the administration’s voice and offend its considerable ego.

[Guffaws!] That’s pretty much cutting off your nose to spite your face. The majority of the legacy media are biased in favor of liberalism, and the Inquirer more than most. If the news organizations Mr Friedlich listed boycotted, what makes him think that they’d ever be allowed back?

They can, of course, deploy their reporters and editors to cover attacks on fellow press as they would other abuses of power or criminal acts.

What? Does the author believe that they are not doing that already? 🙂

News organizations can also leverage their opinion pages to express the official views of their owners and publishers, independent of their news pages.

Again, does the author believe that they are not doing that already? The Inquirer’s Editorial and OpEd pages are full of columnists who absolutely despise Mr Trump, and they aren’t afraid of telling readers so. Will Bunch in particular is infected with #TrumpDerangementSyndrome, but Helen Ubiñas, Jenice Armstrong, and Solomon Jones are not far behind. Trudy Rubin, the ‘Worldview’ columnist, certainly abhors the President’s foreign policy. Going to The Washington Post and The New York Times yields pretty much the same things, just under different names, though admittedly, the columnists at those papers are not quite as spittle-flecking outraged, at least on paper, as is Mr Bunch.

The actual solution is fairer news coverage. Yes, there are conservatively oriented news sources out there, and Fox News Channel draws far more viewers than any of the 24 hour news channels. In January, Fox drew more viewers than the liberally-oriented MSNBC and CNN combined. CNN was actually beat out by the Food Network, Hallmark Channel, and HGTV. 🙂  But if the legacy media were presenting a more fair and balanced view of things, did a better job of keeping opinions out of what are supposed to be straight news stories, and added a few conservative voices to their opinion sections, maybe people would have more faith in what’s being reported than they do now.