"It’s exhausting being a reporter in the Trump era. A new documentary captures the toll at the New York Times," so says, the Washington Post.
There was a time when incest was illegal, but in the media it's practically mandatory.
WaPo is talking up The Fourth Estate, a Showtime doc which attempts to give the failing Carlos Slim joint the full All the President's Men treatment.
From the first moments of The Fourth Estate — as Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet watches Trump sworn on a screen in the newsroom — there's the dramatic air of a gauntlet being thrown down.
Because you know... the media is objective.
It in no way would respond to losing an election by trying to overturn its results.
A bracing, real-life thriller with shades of All the President's Men... the docu-series gives a rare view of the day-to-day toil of investigative journalists navigating an unpredictable and ceaseless story.
There we go. We couldn't do this without media goons pretending they're Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman. (When they roll the dice in the break room, the loser has to play Bernstein.)
But there are no doubt many hours of compelling footage of Times jornos googling Russian cities and cutting and pasting from Wikipedia.
"It humanizes the New York Times. It shows our flaws, too. How could it not?" said Baquet. "But it shows a bunch of reporters and their editors struggling to cover a big story. It shows the impact it has on our daily lives when we do that. I think it shows us as regular people as opposed to arrogant, distant, whatever the worst is people think of us."
Yes, even the Commissars had hard days at work when they shoot too many people.
Baquet grants the newsroom was "mixed" on having cameras in its midst and that some found it intrusive. But many of the reporters frequently documented include some of the newspaper's page-one regulars: Michael S. Schmidt , Matt Apuzzo , Adam Goldman , Mark Mazzetti and Haberman.
They didn't keep the cameras on Glenn Thrush, I would venture to guess.
"If people see Maggie Haberman go about her business and how much reporting she does, I think if people see the Washington bureau struggling with covering the daily news, it builds our credibility," he said.
It's a tough struggle.
Do we run that editorial accusing Trump of destroying the norms or do we run the other one denouncing Republicans for not distancing themselves from him. We've run both 100 times. So let's just flip a coin and go out for drinks.