The Columbia-Oxford-Reuters Jelani Cobb Double Standard

Plus, The Editors live on video at noon today

Program note: I’m planning a “live” video event—the second ever for The Editors—today at noon eastern time with Clarence Schwab, a Harvard Business School graduate who has been an important behind-the-scenes activist combating antisemitism at colleges and universities. To listen to today’s event in real time you’ll need the Substack app, so if you haven’t already installed it, this would be a fine opportunity. I’m hoping to make the video available afterward, so if you can’t make it at noon today, don’t stress about it, but if you can make it, please do join us. It should be fun. If all goes as planned, you should get an alert or an email or both when the show starts.

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Columbia Journalism dean Jelani Cobb.

“During the first Trump administration the American press was reluctant to refer to blatant untruths as lies or to refer to outright trafficking in racial stereotypes as racist behaviour. Our own credulity led to the press treating an autocratic president in the same manner as a democratic one,” the dean of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and the Henry R. Luce Professor of Journalism at Columbia, Jelani Cobb, said in his Reuters Memorial Lecture at Oxford on March 10, 2025.

Cobb went on to complain about what he called “the banning” of the Associated Press “from White House briefings and having their reporters and photographers disallowed from traveling with the President.” He said, “It is odd that any news organisation, certainly any American one, would continue to attend White House briefings or travel with the President while a reputable outlet has been exiled for a decision made on editorial principle.”

Cobb’s comments were mentioned toward the end, and in the paywalled portion, of yesterday’s post here, and referenced in the subheadline, “Al Jazeera-loving Columbia dean asks press to boycott Trump.” But they are so wrongheaded, and Cobb is such a prominent figure—according to his Columbia bio, in addition to his Columbia roles as dean, professor, and Pulitzer juror, he is a staff writer at the New Yorker, a political analyst for MSNBC, and a trustee of the New York Public Library—that they are worth a more detailed and fully developed response.

To begin with, it’s simply inaccurate to claim that the AP has been banned from “White House briefings.” Just this week, the AP’s Josh Boak was sparring over tariffs with White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, at a briefing inside the White House. What has happened is that the AP has been downgraded from its previous special access to small “pool” events, such as those in the Oval Office, where space constraints don’t allow the entire White House press corps to have access.

But the problems with the Cobb approach go well beyond the factual inaccuracy. The approach he’s proposing, of differential treatment for an “autocratic president” and a “democratic one,” requires some decisionmaker to decide which of the two treatments the president is going to get. Who decides and when and on what basis, and what if the decisions turn out to be wrong? What if the president doesn’t fall so neatly into either of the two categories? The reality is that such an approach risks undermining public confidence in the press. Once a news outlet declares that it is treating a president under the different and hostile “autocratic president” standard, it abandons the credibility that comes with open-minded impartiality. Anyone not already convinced of the autocracy of the president is unlikely to be persuaded by information from a news outlet that has become blatantly partisan.

The press is diverse and free, so unless they all get together and declare some president is getting the autocrat treatment rather than the democrat treatment, some outlets will adhere to the old-fashioned, open-minded impartiality standard. Those outlets will make the ones who have abandoned that standard appear even more tilted by comparison. Readers who haven’t yet made up their minds, or want to consider alternative points of view, will gravitate toward the outlets that are curious rather than those that have prematurely decided to give a president the autocrat treatment.

David Greenberg, the John Lewis biographer who is not at all a Trump fan and who teaches at Rutgers, where Cobb got his Ph.D., tackled all this well in a 2022 piece for Liberties, “The War on Objectivity in American Journalism.” Bret Stephens made a similar case in his 2023 New York Times piece, How to Destroy (What’s Left of) the Mainstream Media’s Credibility. Stephens and Greenberg have by far the better of this argument than does Cobb, who doesn’t even attempt to grapple with their counterarguments.

What’s underappreciated is the way that abandoning objectivity almost requires a united front by the press. Cobb’s plea for the entire White House press corps to express solidarity with the Associated Press by stopping covering Trump isn’t a separate, unrelated point from the observation about “treating an autocratic president in the same manner as a democratic one”—it’s an intrinsically related codicil to it. The only way abandoning objectivity works is if the press all does it together at once, so that there are no outlets remaining where readers can get the old-fashioned, open-minded impartiality standard. That way the bias becomes less visible, because there is no non-biased coverage to compare it to.

It’s ironic that Cobb’s plan for press to combat an autocratic president demands, for its own success, an ideologically uniform press perspective about whether the president is autocratic or not. There were attempts at this during the first Trump term. In 2018, The Boston Globe led a 350-news organization coordinated campaign to denounce Trump’s “enemy of the people” language against the press. A heterodox, non-doctrinaire press is one of the checks on an autocracy—as the framers of the First Amendment understood—so if the goal is supporting democracy and fighting autocracy, the Columbia-Cobb plan could be counterproductive. If David Greenberg or Bret Stephens aren’t available, I’d be happy to offer this argument at Oxford at next year’s Reuters lecture. Or better yet, do it as a panel discussion, or a debate, and demonstrate for those present the virtue of diverse opinions. That’s the democratic way, not the autocratic approach.