How should reporters cover the White House? Case study number one could be reporter Maggie Haberman of The New York Times, whose work has, during the Trump years, been particularly fraught. Her sympathetic profile of former-Trump-flak-turned-former-White-House-Communications-Director Hope Hicks, torn between obeying a congressional subpoena and obeying her former boss, illustrated the problem quite neatly. Haberman’s critics accused the reporter of trading favorable coverage for access—one of the oldest weapons in a Beltway reporter’s (or any reporter’s, for that matter) arsenal. Her defenders shouted that it didn’t matter because her reporting has sometimes also made the president angry.

There are philosophical questions at play here: How newsworthy is relaying “the administration’s thinking” about its immoral or illegal acts? Is positive—or even neutral—coverage of anyone connected to the Trump administration really ever an acceptable trade for access? How important is that sort of access in telling the story? But it’s a debate that also gets to the heart of journalism itself: How do you select and provide necessary information to the public? In a space increasingly driven by palace intrigue stories—who’s up and who’s down in the White House this week—a “beat sweetener” penned about a former White House communications official seems of paramount importance. Surely there is a better way.

Michael Wolff, the author of last year’s blockbuster White House exposé Fire and Fury, and now its just-published sequel, Siege: Trump Under Fire, thinks there is. He has suggested that the issue is best thought of as a dichotomy. “It’s a distinction between journalists who are institutionally wedded and those who are not. I’m not,” said Wolff when pressed by Times media critic Michael Grynbaum on the author’s refusal to ask Trump for comment. “You make those pro forma calls to protect yourself, to protect the institution. It’s what the institution demands.” (Institutional journalists, for the purposes of Wolff’s argument, would undoubtedly include Haberman, with whose reporting he has expressed annoyance over in the past.)

A year ago, Wolff suggested that journalism works best when these two forces are both powerful—and that this is unfortunately a historical moment dominated by institutionally wedded journalists. But here, it is a convenient endorsement of his own approach. Fire and Fury sold over five million copies on the back of its sensational claims about the inner workings of the Trump administration—and what administration officials really thought of the president. Siege, published on Tuesday, is, if anything, even more sensational.



Though he has been long derided by some in the media for his approach, which can blend gossip with more readily verifiable facts, Fire and Fury became a sensation in part because Wolff vouched for its veracity. Having written a series of slavish articles attacking the media’s coverage of Trump, Wolff was given unfettered access to the White House. He would sit all day, becoming almost a piece of furniture, and simply record what he saw. He used the access reporters arsenal of tricks to open the doors of the White House—and then burned nearly all of his sources.