Peter Baker fundamentally rejects the idea that the press gives more favorable coverage to Joe Biden than it did to Donald Trump when he was in the White House. According to the New York Times’ Chief White House Correspondent, the approach isn’t what changes. The person in the Oval Office does.
“I think we cover every president exactly the same,” he said this week on CSPAN’s Washington Journal. “What we see is what’s in front of us. Joe Biden is different than Donald Trump. Donald Trump is different than Barack Obama. Barack Obama is different than George W. Bush.”
He added that readers and viewers should not want anything different. That wouldn’t be honest coverage.
“You don’t want the press to create a false equivalency where every president is exactly the same in order to create some sort of fairness. No, you report what you see. You report what your sources tell you. You report the facts that you gather.”
A poll released by Gallup earlier this week showed a near record number of Americans have no faith at all in the media. It’s a sentiment that Donald Trump has echoed since he first entered politics. Baker dismissed the accusations of unfairness from the White House as misguided strategy.
“I think that Donald Trump wanted us to be his opponent because it was convenient,” he said. “He wanted to make us the opposition party and it is our job as journalists not to fall into that trap.”
