Bearers of bad news

When President Trump refused to take a question from a CNN reporter at the Chequers press conference last week, I imagine a lot of British viewers thought —as Theresa May clearly did — that he was being graceless, capricious and anti-freedom of speech.

But I think we’re in danger of underestimating the extent to which the media landscape has changed in the past few years. Gone are the days — if they ever existed — when political interviewers were dispassionate seekers-after-truth on a mission to get the best out of their subjects. Now, it’s mostly activism-driven, the aim being to advance your preferred narrative while showing up your ideological opponents in as unflattering a light as possible. When someone sincerely believes you are a shit and their only purpose is to persuade everyone else that you’re a shit, why would you choose to grant them that opportunity?

Well, you wouldn’t. Unless, perhaps, you sensed a chance to exploit their arrogance and complacency in order horribly to humiliate them. This is what happened when Channel 4’s Matt Frei attempted to ambush Sebastian Gorka the other day. Because Gorka is a former advisor to Trump, Frei had rather too glibly assumed — as those in the liberal London media bubble do — that anyone with such deplorable and vulgar associations must a) be very thick and b) exult so shamelessly in his manifest evil that he wouldn’t remotely mind being poked with a stick for ten minutes while being hectored on how thoroughly debased his cause was.

Gorka wasn’t having it. First, he was better informed than Frei — as he demonstrated to withering effect when Frei cited ‘12 named Russian agents’ who had just been indicted for ‘hacking into the DNC’ and trying to swing the elections for Trump.