Brett Stephens: Trump’s ‘Waging a Systematic Effort to Discredit the News Media’

EXCERPT:

STEPHENS: "Well, Danny was just a model journalist and like so many people at the 'The Wall Street Journal' or other great American news institutions, for him, you know, the truth was an assemblage of fact. He built the truth by assembling facts, the way you --"
HALPERIN: "Carefully observed." [crosstalk]
STEPHENS: "-- president carefully observed. And we are living in an era where the executive branch of the government is waging a systemic effort to discredit news media, discredit the kind of work that Danny did. So that was the starting point of the lecture. What I wanted to understand was what are the purposes of Trump’s falsehoods or lies? Why is it that we come to believe them? And why is it that I think a lot of conservative pundits are at risk of discrediting themselves intellectually by performing the kinds of rationalizations that we were just talk about."