Back when his country was controlled by the USSR, the Czech writer Milan Kundera pointed out that ‘Union of Soviet Socialist Republics’ was ‘four words, four lies’. It’s a strike rate that even the current US president has yet to match. Nonetheless, at one stage in Reporting Trump’s First Year: The Fourth Estate (BBC2, Sunday) we did see him pull off an impressive three-sentences, three-lies sequence in a speech about — inevitably — the mainstream media, including the New York Times. ‘They have no “sources”,’ said Trump baldly. ‘They just make ’em up. They are the enemy of the people.’
Not that Trump will care, but by then we already knew how scrupulously the paper in question goes about its reporting. The New York Times has given the makers of this new documentary series remarkable access to what goes on behind the scenes — which is to say a lot of careful fact-checking and a refusal to publish any story that can’t be fully backed up. (Rather disappointingly, of course, the actual process of publishing no longer involves the thunderous rolling of presses, but clicking on a computer icon labelled ‘publish’.)
In the first episode, the Times did eventually find the sources required to score some serious scoops. The overwhelming impression, though, was of clever, slightly earnest newspaper types struggling to understand the new world in which they found themselves: a world where the traditional rules have gone and there’s a president who, as one reporter put it, ‘is very comfortable not telling the truth’.
In the circumstances, sad to say, the executive editor’s continued commitment to ‘independent honest inquiry’ sounded almost quaint, although not as much as the publisher’s proud declaration that, ‘We’re not driven by clicks, we think in decades’.
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