Narcissistic Personality Disorder . . .

“The phrase ‘enemy of the people’ is not just false, it’s dangerous,” Sulzberger said. “As I have repeatedly told President Trump face-to-face, there are mounting signs that this incendiary rhetoric is encouraging threats and violence against journalists at home and abroad.”

The assertive public pushback came after the President attacked the Times for reporting Tuesday that he had asked then-Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker to put a political ally in charge of the federal investigation into Trump’s ex-lawyer Michael Cohen last year.

The Times cited interviews with dozens of current and former U.S. officials to back up the allegation that raises serious questions of whether the President tried to obstruct a criminal investigation he has a direct stake in.

And when Trump falsely claimed in another tweet that the “dishonest” newspaper didn’t reach out to the White House for comment on the bombshell piece, the Times communications team didn’t hesitate to slap him down.

“The White House was given 5 days to respond to the details of our investigation,” the team’s Twitter handle responded directly to Trump’s post. “The Times followed up multiple times but no response was given on the record until the President addressed the story after its publication.”

Trump’s love-hate relationship with the press has been on full display since the very earliest days of his 2016 presidential campaign — and it’s only grown more heated since he took up residence in the Oval Office.

At times, he’s openly derided reporters at press conferences, grown combative when urged to answer questions, threatened to revoke credentials, and told journalists to sit down and shut up — and heckled the mainstream press in general as being the mouthpiece of “fake news.” Only Fox News host Sean Hannity, conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh and other media that show support for his policies earn presidential praise.

At rallies, Trump frequently elicits cheers from the audience by mocking the press. He’s referred to journalists as “sick people,” questioned their patriotism and said they are trying “to take away our history and our heritage.”

“I really think they don’t like our country,” he said at one rally in 2017 — remarks that were highlighted by The Times.

Sulzberger on Wednesday blasted Trump’s constant raging at the press for doing its job, saying the President’s inflammatory insults and “enemy of the people” attitude was a dangerous throwback to dark times.

“It has an ugly history of being wielded by dictators and tyrants who sought to control public information,” Sulzberger said. “And it is particularly reckless coming from someone whose office gives him broad powers to fight or imprison the nation’s enemies.”

Former Presidents Thomas Jefferson, John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan were all committed to the idea that “a free press was essential to democracy,” Sulzberger added, before asking if Trump would be the one to break that constitutional ideal.

“All these Presidents had complaints about their coverage and at times took advantage of the freedom every American has to criticize journalists,” Sulzberger said. “But in demonizing the free press as the enemy, simply for performing its role of asking difficult questions and bringing uncomfortable information to light, President Trump is retreating from a distinctly American principle.”

The appalling imbroglio comes at a time when violence against journalists is at an “unprecedented” high, according to Reporters Without Borders, a Paris-based nonprofit advocating for press freedoms worldwide.

Eighty journalists were killed in 2018, another 348 were detained and 60 were held hostage in the course of doing their jobs, according to a report released by the group in December.

There’s been palpable effects in the U.S. as well.

Just two weeks ago, a BBC cameraman was attacked by a Trump supporter wearing a “Make American Great Again” hat at a Texas rally where the President was speaking.

Trump gave the man a thumbs-up sign from the podium after the attack and went on speaking when the man returned it, the BBC reported.

In late October, a Trump-loving madman named Cesar Sayoc unleashed a wave of terror in the nation by mailing pipe bombs to CNN’s newsroom and to the homes of some of the President’s most high-profile political opponents, according to authorities. Sayoc’s social media profiles were littered with pro-Trump screeds trashing journalists.

• Donald Trump
• The New York Times Company
• Cesar Altieri Sayoc

When the audience don’t believe the news, we’re all in trouble

A thread runs through several of the stories that have defined this turbulent summer: reporters have been shocked by the levels of hostility they have encountered. ‘They hate us,’ one seasoned producer told me returning from a Grenfell Tower protest. ‘I haven’t felt anything like it in 20 years.’

When the battalions of the media descend on any big story, the experience rarely leaves those caught up in it feeling warm and fuzzy about the fourth estate. But this is different.

In each case there is a specific, albeit related, animus. During the election, it was Corbyn supporters convinced the mainstream media was bent on doing down their man. At Grenfell, it was an alarmingly widespread suspicion that the media — and especially the BBC — (Pure propaganda)

were part of an establishment conspiracy to play down the scale of the disaster. For the Finsbury Park attack, the charge was that the sensationalist coverage of previous attacks had whipped up Islamophobia.

Saying that trust has been declining in most institutions is a bit like noting that fewer people go to church these days. But confidence in the media has been ebbing quicker than a spring tide. The percentage of people in the UK who said they trusted the media fell from 36 to 24 in the last year, according to the annual Edelman Trust Barometer. If things continue at that rate, fewer than one in ten people will trust us three years from now.

It doesn’t take much imagination to see what a wholesale breakdown of trust in the media can do to a society. In the US, average levels of trust in the media have more than halved since the 1970s. But they have collapsed among Republicans, just 14 per cent of whom say they trust the media. When whole portions of a society don’t believe what they read or hear, the prospects of building any kind of cross-party consensus about what’s true and what isn’t become vanishingly thin. What’s left is a vacuum in which made-up stories are as plausible as any other kind. Fake news is not a tech problem; it’s a symptom of broken trust in the media.

We tend to comfort ourselves that the picture in Britain is nothing like as grim; that our debate is more reasoned. Broadcasters still command relatively high levels of public confidence and even the BBC’s detractors acknowledge that it’s trusted by more people than not. But the howls of outrage from first SNP supporters, then Corbynistas, over alleged BBC bias had alarming echoes of the rising anti-media mood we’ve seen in the US.

There is a real risk that we will slide into a vicious cycle: the more vituperative and orchestrated the criticism becomes, the more inclined we in the media are to ignore it. And  as a result, the more vituperative and orchestrated it becomes.

To this febrile atmosphere, we then add the complication of two major parties splitting down the middle — the Tories over Brexit, and Labour over Corbyn. In such circumstances, the chances that someone,  somewhere will see bias in any piece of output multiply. In a much simpler world not long ago, a discussion panel could be comfortably balanced with a representative from right and left. But nowadays, unless it reflects both centrist and Corbynite Labour factions, Brexiteers and Remainers, someone, somewhere will be stewing.

I don’t pretend to have any easy answers, but here are a few things that might help. Firstly, journalists should show a bit more humility. We should admit when we get things wrong. Most of us badly underestimated Corbyn, for instance: we should own up to it and ask what we can learn. Second, we should perhaps also engage with 

conspiracy theories, even when they seem quite batty. The idea that media have been conspiring to minimise the number of casualties in the Grenfell fire seems preposterous to most journalists. But it has taken grip to a shocking extent. We need to address such fallacies head-on.

Third, we should give airtime to a greater diversity of voices. Of all the criticisms regularly levelled at shows like Newsnight, maybe the fairest is that too many of our contributors come from a relatively narrow band of opinion Those who carry water for the Globalvt agenda). It’s perhaps not surprising that viewers and listeners who do not see their own views reflected are less inclined to trust our coverage.

Possibly the most important thing we can do, however, is to acknowledge we have a problem. Right now the media’s attitude to trust brings to mind the proverbial frog in the pan of boiling water. Each increase in the temperature seems just about tolerable, but before we know it we are cooked. And it is starting to feel quite hot in here.