The vilifying of the press has gotten so bad that some solace was provided Sunday by The Washington Post, which reported from Abu Dhabi that "Defense Secretary Jim Mattis...does not see the media as the enemy of the American people."

Now all journalists have to do is find a viable business model and all worries will disappear!

While that Post headline might have inspired huzzahs among the Trump-obsesssed national media, The Wall Street Journal's editorial page writers are frequently finding themselves at odds in a Civil War of political ideas.

Among the combatants is the distinctly Trump-wary columnist Bret Stephens, who just delivered a superb Daniel Pearl Memorial Lecture this week at the University of California, Los Angeles.

It's a smart look by a conservative at the method behind the anti-media madness of Trump — and why it's worked. Stephens declines to blame Trump's adherents as he succinctly defends the journalism that the late Pearl practiced and represented.

"Ideologically, the president is trying to depose so-called mainstream media in favor of the media he likes — Breitbart News and the rest," said Stephens, who notes the irony of winning new liberal fans by merely sticking up for views he argues too many conservatives have fled. "Another way of making this point is to say that he’s trying to substitute news for propaganda, information for boosterism."

"His objection to, say, the New York Times, isn’t that there’s a liberal bias in the paper that gets in the way of its objectivity, which I think would be a fair criticism. His objection is to objectivity itself. He’s perfectly happy for the media to be disgusting and corrupt — so long as it’s on his side."

Ultimately, Stephens is very good on the rank hypocrisy of all his ideological friends who bashed Bill Clinton for immorality now rationalizing their Trump support.

Along the way he makes good use of a 1953 work by the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, citing "the psychological and intellectual pathways through which some of his former colleagues in Poland’s post-war Communist regime allowed themselves to be converted into ardent Stalinists."

What was up?

"They wanted to believe. They were willing to adapt. They thought they could do more good from the inside. They convinced themselves that their former principles didn’t fit with the march of history, or that to hold fast to one’s beliefs was a sign of priggishness and pig-headedness."

Isn't it interesting how many people we know — in public life or in our personal spheres — get tripped up by one falsehood or otherwise errant action and are screwed? Maybe it's plagiarism, a faulty resume, cheating on an expense account. But the very ubiquity of Trump's deceits are fascinating to the extent that we may become inured to them.

That gets him back to the world of Pearl, some of which he quotes as an example of old-fashioned journalism at play, namely of observing with ones senses.

"George Orwell wrote, 'To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.' Danny saw what was in front of his nose."

Swedes go batty

"In a speech on Saturday, U.S. President Donald Trump suggested that something had happened 'last night in Sweden' — prompting baffled Swedes to take to Twitter and other social media wondering what on earth the American leader might have been referring to," reported the English language Local in Stockholm.

As if making the point The Wall Street Journal's Stephens had made, Trump tweeted Sunday, "My statement as to what's happening in Sweden was in reference to a story that was broadcast on @FoxNews concerning immigrants and Sweden."