Wait, what? Peter Baker of the New York Times decries "normalization" of Trump

[Emrys]

Since the scribblings of Peter Baker of the NYT keep cropping up on DU with tedious regularity at the moment, I make no apologies for posting this 2020 article from Dan Froomkin at Salon which shows that Baker may have deteriorated, perhaps through advancing age, but the warning signs have been there for quite some time. Maybe Baker's family will do the right thing and suggest it's time he hang up his laptop.

Wait, what? Peter Baker of the New York Times decries "normalization" of Trump
No journalist has done more to make Trump seem "presidential" than NYT's D.C. bureau chief. Here are the receipts

In Friday's New York Times, the paper's White House bureau chief, Peter Baker, tut-tutted the "normalization" of Donald Trump's presidency — as if he himself, along with his colleagues, weren't among the people most responsible for it.

In a "White House Memo," Baker wrote about the damning things former national security adviser John Bolton says about Trump in his new book — revelations that Trump "sees his office as an instrument to advance his own personal and political interests over those of the nation"; that Trump is "erratic," "impulsive" and "stunningly uninformed"; that he makes "irrational" decisions; and that he feels that "the rules that governed other presidents in the post-Watergate era are meant to be broken."

Baker's "nut graf," as we call it in the business, came after he described a scene in which Bolton agrees with then-chief of staff John F. Kelly that there has never "been a presidency like this." Baker wrote:

That is self-evidently true and yet it bears repeating every once in a while. After more than three years of the Trump presidency, it has become easy to forget at times just how out of the ordinary it really is. The normalization of Mr. Trump's norm-busting, line-crossing, envelope-pushing administration has meant that what was once shocking now seems like just another day.

As it happens, I don't actually think the public experiences Trump's presidency as normal — quite the contrary. I think there are two widely held and mutually exclusive views of the president, and in neither of them is he even remotely normal.

But reading, listening to and watching the news coverage of Donald Trump, I am often struck at the lack of context, alarm and outrage from the mainstream political media. There's an awful lot of stenography and credulousness.

So, coming from almost anyone besides Peter Baker, what he wrote there would be astute media criticism.

Coming from him, though, it's preposterously, laughably ironic.

https://www.salon.com/2020/06/22/wait-what-peter-baker-of-the-new-york-times-decries-normalization-of-trump/

Do click through - there are quite a few "nut grafs" in what Froomkin wrote.

[Fla Dem]

1. Peter Baker has always walked a thin line between truth and fiction.

His reporting mostly against the Left Leadership, has been marginally biased. Just enough to cast a shadow on their programs and actions, but not enough to cast a shadow on his neutrality as a reporter.