WaPo's Philip Bump Says Journalism 'Needs to Learn How to Defend Itself'

We see a lot of people tweeting, "No matter how much you hate the media, it's not enough." Nieman Lab says it "asks some of the smartest people in journalism what they think is coming in the new year." One of these smartest people in journalism is Washington Post columnist Philip Bump, who is doing all he can to assure us there's zero evidence that President Joe Biden was involved in any influence peddling. He recently warned about "the rise of ‘Chinese Communist Party’ as a pejorative."

The New York Post's Miranda Divine wrote:

Bump, who could be a minor character in Evelyn Waugh’s classic satirical novel about journalism, 'Scoop,' has been wrong on almost every aspect of the Hunter Biden laptop saga, just as Bump was on the Russia hoax and the Donald Trump 'photo op' controversy in Lafayette Park in DC.
For instance, when every other media organization finally admitted that Hunter Biden’s laptop was real, Bump clung to his story that "the laptop was seeded by Russian intelligence.”
As George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley points out, Bump spreads “false stories” and then refuses to accept the facts even after he’s been proven to be spectacularly wrong.
He never has apologized, nor has the Washington Post issued a correction or reassessed whether Bump needs remedial editing.

He doesn't apologize, but he did delete that tweet where he claimed that "14 presidents" had called out the danger of Donald Trump to democracy.

Here's what he's whining about in 2024:

Attacks on the media have never been bounded by politics. The two overlap, certainly, particularly in recent years. But there have always been business owners or criminals who are happy to see the media pilloried.
What has changed is that there is now an omnipresent rumble of dismissal and hatred and violence, largely from the right. This comes from the politically prominent, sure — again, I don’t need to use any names — and from those they empower directly. But it also comes from countless other people, people who feel emboldened to hate reporting that challenges them and to see those reporters as a threat.
In part because we spent so long ignoring the way in which we and our work were misrepresented, the bubble that surrounds and protects a surreal worldview has inflated and strengthened. There are now more voices reinforcing the same false ideas, making those ideas seem more true and true ideas more false. This is kindling for fury at our work.
We have to confront it. We have to confront it now. We have to recognize that our ability to defend ourselves weakens, however slightly, every day — just as we quietly recognize that it may weaken dramatically, soon.

How about instead of "confronting it" you look in a mirror and realize that the mainstream media has tarnished its own credibility? "There are now more voices reinforcing the same false ideas," he claims. Oh no, citizen journalists on X can report too, but it's all "misinformation" — don't believe it unless it comes from a respected source like the Washington Post

WaPo's Philip Bump Says Journalism 'Needs to Learn How to Defend Itself'

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