The new cadre of journalists was a little less focused on accuracy and a little more into likes and retweets

On a riser in the ballroom of the New York Hilton on the night when Donald Trump was first elected, a tripod jammed into the back of my leg, and I overheard a conversation between two journalists in the same section.

It was already after midnight, clear that these results were for real, and most of the people on the risers — reporters, cameramen, sound men — were in acute distress. But one woman behind me was cheerful.

“Listen,” she told a colleague, “for months now, Trump has made us the story, pointing to us and even calling us out by name. If he’s president, then we’ll be news, always. It’s the best thing that ever happened to us. Let’s roll with it.”

It’s rule number one in journalism: You are not the story. But Trump, she was arguing, had made them the story, so why not enjoy it?

Her prediction played out over the next few years with correspondents and journalists, previously unknown, developing national profiles, more than a few of them writing books by cashing in the chaos and commotion to write books.

Perhaps.

But it didn’t really start in 2016.

More than a century ago, Walter Lippmann of the New York World wrote scathingly of how cultural blinders had distorted New York Times coverage of the Russian Revolution.

“In the large, the news about Russia is a case of seeing not what was, but what men wished to see,” he wrote.

Lippmann and others began to look for ways for the individual journalist “to remain clear and free of his irrational, his unexamined, his unacknowledged prejudgments in observing, understanding, and presenting the news.”

A century later and the accusation still lives, perhaps even more acutely than back then.

Because everyone has stopped pretending. Trump doesn’t pretend to like the media, and in exchange, they have stopped pretending to be partial.

Not everyone blames Trump, though.

“I regret to inform you,” says Liel Leibovitz, a senior writer at Tablet, “that the American press has died a tragic death, most likely by blunt force applied to its head sometime ago. Investigations are still afoot, but the likely suspect is the Internet, having robbed news outlets of their main source of revenue, advertising, and ushering in a cheaper, crasser, and far less meaningful system of rewards that praises sound and fury rather than thought and careful contemplation. This presented political operatives with golden opportunities to create their echo chambers, which, in short order, they did.”