Needed: A Deep State of Impartial Media Focus on the Deep State
The Trump administration presents a challenge for investigative journalists that is qualitatively different from the one faced by traditional political reporters. Those who cover elections, campaigns and the White House have been subjected to a barrage of name-calling and criticism from Donald Trump since the day he announced his candidacy. Putting that aside and staying neutral—especially when covering a President who strikes many as a mendacious pot calling some kettles black—puts a strain on the normal rules of engagement.
How can a reporter, editor or news organization stay neutral when the office-holder they are covering keeps accusing them of being dishonest purveyors of “fake news”? The answer: with great difficulty.
Daily coverage is hard enough. But when it comes to investigating wrongdoing or misfeasance in government—or just plain scoops uncovering what the federal government is up to—the stakes are much higher, and the cost of abandoning journalistic neutrality is much greater too.
In this case it can lead journalists to take sides in government turf battles, casting those who oppose Trump as the good guys instead of interested parties whose motives should be scrutinized as intensely as the President's.
Glenn Greenwald, a constitutional lawyer and journalist, anticipated this dynamic before Inauguration Day, warning that Democrats and their allies in the media, “craving Deep State rule,” were “cheering for the CIA and its shadowy allies to unilaterally subvert the U.S. election and impose its own policy dictates on the elected president.”
Greenwald was prescient. Once Trump took office, parts of the Deep State - defined here broadly as the unelected federal bureaucracy - went into resistance mode, and the dissenters weren’t all in the intelligence community. Workers in the Environmental Protection Agency, Foreign Service and Labor Department reportedly created new email addresses and turned to encryption software to hide their communications from Trump appointees, including the new EPA chief, Scott Pruitt. Coincidentally or not, news organizations had deployed new encrypted methods for accepting whistleblower leaks.
While resistance within the bureaucracy was wide, the most consequential pushback was against short-lived National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. Although some journalists raised questions about the propriety of leaks of classified information from Deep State sources to media outlets hostile to Trump, establishment voices on both the left and right suggested an ends-justifies-the-means ethos. Influential Republican commentator William Kristol, for instance, said in a tweet after Flynn's ouster that he’d “prefer the deep state to the Trump state” absent “normal democratic and constitutional politics.”
Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York had earlier expressed no misgivings about selective leaking of classified information to undermine a political appointee. “Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” he said in warning Trump that picking a fight with the Deep State would be “really dumb.”
David Brooks, the New York Times columnist, echoed Schumer in apparent expectation of Trump’s defeat by the bureaucracy: “The Civil Service has a thousand ways to ignore or sit on any presidential order,” he wrote. “The intelligence community has only just begun to undermine this president.”
That’s one view. Here’s another: The unelected administrative state, rather than be indulged or tacitly encouraged, should be held to account with the highest journalistic standards. Its hidden workings are perhaps the most underreported major American political story of our era.
The reasons it doesn’t get much critical coverage go beyond mere bias and are as complex as the reasons for its rise. It grew gradually in ebbs and flows over decades as executive power, social complexity and progressive demands on government grew. Members of both parties are responsible, especially members of Congress who found political convenience in ceding the unpopular nitty-gritty of legislation to bureaucrats.
Big as it is, this Leviathan isn’t given to easy press scrutiny. And it is an unsexy beast: Gray documents and camera-shy functionaries are less telegenic than the microphone-and-klieg-light political theater that dominates coverage of Washington.
The permanent government is at the heart of the “ruling class” that people voted against when they elected Trump in November. For that very reason, there’s a high risk that we in the media, given mutual dislike between the press and Trump, will miss a big part of the story—perhaps the biggest part.
Granted, President Trump seems disposed to be a deep-state authoritarian himself, especially should he and his chief strategist Stephen Bannon, declared enemy of the bureaucratic state, have any success bending it to their will. All the more reason to examine deeply the Deep State to determine whether this is the kind of country Americans want. To do otherwise would be, as the world’s most famous tweeter might say: Sad.
Tom Kuntz is the editor of RealClearInvestigations.
