From nojo:
Last weekend, the New York Times published a sympathetic profile of longtime Trump confidante and former presidential adviser Hope Hicks. We know it was sympathetic because it described Hicks’s anguish over a decision whether to testify about Trump to Congress.
The story called that decision an “existential question”.
Twitter had fun with that. Twitter also had fun with the fact that the existential question was whether to obey the law. Hicks wasn’t entertaining an invitation; she was deciding whether to comply with a subpoena.
The fashion-shoot portrait accompanying the story didn’t help, either.
Much of the malicious glee was directed at the story’s writer, Maggie Haberman. Haberman’s one of those White House reporters with regular scoops on Oval Office palace intrigue; it was suggested that Hicks was one of her main anonymous sources, and the sympathetic story was returning the favor.
The weekend passed, the Times quietly changed the offending word to “crucial”, and the party moved on to the next outrage — until Tuesday, when Jonathan Chait published a vociferous defense of Haberman and her work.
“The progressive loathing of Haberman draws some of its force from the mistaken belief that straight news reporters should stand up to the president and call him out for his unfitness to hold office,” Chait wrote. “Some people who believe this fail to grasp the distinction between news gathering and opinion journalism.”
And on Twitter, the Blue Checkmarks came out to join Chait in his praise, proclaiming the unassailable virtue of Haberman’s work and deep misunderstanding of journalism itself.
At which point our head exploded.