Two opposite and instructive figures in US journalism during the Trump years are Gerard Baker, editor of the Wall Street Journal, and Martin Baron, editor of the Washington Post. Baker, a Brit, formerly of the FT and the Times, and Baron, a child of Israeli immigrants to Florida, ex LA Times, the New York Times and the Boston Globe, are members of the last generation of newspaper men to have spent the better part of their careers in a generally thriving business. Both men now lead papers controlled by billionaires who sustain these enterprises for largely non-economic reasons - quite likely the future of the quality newspaper, if there is to be a future. Baker's billionaire is Rupert Murdoch; Baron's is Jeff Bezos.

Both men are beholden to their proprietors and, as editors always are, in a complex dance to both pursue their own vision of the news and also please their boss. Each boss, given virtually no economic constraints, can be as demanding or capricious as suits his desires. The outside assumption is that Murdoch is more conservative and Bezos more liberal but, both being billionaires, caprice is likely as strong a motivation. At the same time, both editors have a great deal of autonomy in how they cover the news on a day-to-day basis and, in doing so, shape the narrative of the time.

While there are differences in the WSJ and Post markets, there is a greater overall similarity - an uppermost demographic seeking an authoritative news product. Both Baker and Baron run news organisations that, along with the New York Times, would generally be considered to represent the top talent in the business. While challenged by the severe revenue constraints in the newspaper business - mostly due to a dramatic fall in print advertising - both papers have had successes in maintaining large and growing readerships. By most objective measures, each paper, along with the New York Times, provides among the most comprehensive daily overviews of political, economic and international news.

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But Baker is a journalism pariah and Baron a journalism hero.

This partly involves a new definition of journalism, which we will get to, but first, the difference between each man's journalistic approach.

Baker's premise is that a Trump presidency demands nothing more than good journalism as usual - the same type of detail-oriented, inclusive political coverage with a business-focus that the WSJ applied to other presidencies ought to work as well for this one.

Baron's view is that the Trump presidency is anomalous and requires both extra vigilance and even a systematic journalistic effort to undermine it.

Early in the Trump presidency, Baker drew fire with a policy of not calling Trump's exaggerations, hyperbole, misrepresentations or flights of fancy "lies". Calling something a lie - said Baker, making every effort not to prejudge the new president's style and character - assumed intent and perfidiousness.

At the Post, not long after Trump entered the White House, Baron rechristened the paper's masthead with the warning - perhaps less for its readers than for the White House itself - "Democracy dies in darkness." The Post, along with other right-minded journalism organisations, would, in other words, provide the light.

Faced with the most peculiar development in modern political history, Baker, no matter how much he might personally have doubted Trump's capabilities and plausibility, seemed intent on trusting and maintaining his paper's norms. In some obvious way, an important news outlet, by changing its approach to the news, changes the news. Baron, at the Post, saw a new peril that demanded a new kind of adverse relationship, arguably more focused on the character of the man than the particulars of the story. Baron seemed to regard Trump as a clear break in history.

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The new definition of journalism has been promulgated through social media by many people who do not make their living in journalism. It is part of the increasing mix-up or partnership of journalism and politics, and it comes out of journalism schools trying to entice students into a business that will not offer them a job. Journalism has become a form of idealism. It is no longer, first and foremost, function, craft, service - it is mission.

Every journalism bromide - speaking truth to power, comforting the afflicted, afflicting the powerful - that otherwise would be hopelessly sappy to a journalist of any experience, has become a Twitter grail. The true business of journalism has become obscured because there is really no longer a journalism business. Journalism is more and more performed out of some greater sense of good, instead of profit.

In September, in an almost 4,000-word piece, the Guardian launched an attack on Baker and the Wall Street Journal. The Guardian is, of course, a prime exponent of the new journalism mission. In financial extremis, it needs to justify its rapid spending-down of its cash reserves as part of a higher purpose, which might include its own martyrdom. Accordingly, it faulted the Journal and its editor for, along with not doing its duty in aggressive pursuit of Trump, betraying all manner of higher journalistic values. A new bromide surfaced that distinguishes journalism from stenography - seeing journalism, in an about-face of its traditional function, as judge and jury of information rather than principally a recorder of it.

Two generations ago, when both Baker and Baron were first starting out in their careers, the most powerful editor in the business was AM Rosenthal at the New York Times. A generally detestable fellow who shepherded the title through the Pentagon Papers and Watergate and into its most profitable era, Rosenthal saw one of his prime functions to be the reining in of the natural sentimental tendencies and overweening social consciences of his reporters. The tilt of a quality broadsheet, he believed, should fall in the authoritative middle - the news pages of the Times and the Post fell in the comfortable just-left-of-centre, the WSJ the comfortable just-right-of-centre.

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Both the Times and the Post, well before Trump, were moving dramatically left. Now, with regular apoplexy, they turn every day under Trump into a dastardly climactic moment - arguably indicating a difficulty in judging relative importance. The WSJ, on the other hand, has, sometimes self-consciously, worked to stay in place. Given that the stock market has largely extended Trump the benefit of the doubt, the Wall Street Journal does the same. Indeed, deep in the Guardian's story, it sheepishly noted, without comment, that a recent YouGov/Economist survey found the Journal to be the most trusted outlet among major US news organisations.

In any event, and putting aside a debate about journalism standards and purpose, the Times, the Post and the Journal each, in their way, reflect a greater targeting towards their audiences. The Times and Post have tried to achieve the clear positioning that more readily builds online traffic. They have also tried to align with a leftward movement of their major-urban-centre audience demographic (for instance, in the Times recently, a full-page story about why a Colorado baker won't bake a cake for a gay couple's wedding). The Journal, on its part, has largely continued to serve its longtime readership: businessmen with a middle-to-conservative tilt.

It is that latter target that, in the larger journalism community, is more and more regarded as inimical to journalism itself.

Of course, part of Baker and the Journal's added problem is Murdoch, and the insidious influence it is assumed he brings to bear on the paper's coverage. This revives a narrative that flowered when Murdoch bought the paper in 2008. Then, he was the tabloid brigand and Fox News owner taking the journalistic gem (albeit a right-of-centre gem - with its further-right editorial page). But that story faded as he made significant new investment in the paper and it became one of the few quality news organisations actually building its staff.

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But Murdoch is a Trumper - said to be actively currying favour with the new president. On the other hand, he is also said to not think very much of Trump and, indeed, to have encouraged both the WSJ and Fox News in the direction of anybody else, even Hillary Clinton, during the campaign. What's more, his sons, now the ranking executives at Murdoch-controlled Twentieth Century Fox and board members at Murdoch-controlled News Corp, the company that owns the Journal, are themselves card-carrying members of the Times and Post demographic and reliable anti-Trumpers.

But, of course, Murdoch is Murdoch - and he sucks up to power. Pay no attention to the fact that Bezos has also sought his own entrée to and influence in the Trump White House.

The WSJ has seen a handful of high-profile newsroom departures - notably, Rebecca Blumenstein, the deputy editor, who went to the Times. Indeed, Trumpmania has suddenly created a new market for top journalism talent and, as well, for young and cheap talent - though not so much for anybody in between.

It is the young and the cheap who've highlighted particular Trump-related issues at the Journal and helped cause the backlash against it. Many, if not most, of these young and cheap staffers are part of the new higher-mission sense of journalism and the media consensus that Trump is a weird and dangerous president. They seem to find themselves as prisoners of the Journal's efforts toward moderation - especially when compared to the Times and the Post. This has resulted in leaks to the Times and the Post (and to the Guardian and Buzzfeed, another young and cheap journalism organisation) about the Journal's moderating efforts that, in the Trump age, have come to seem like a kind of quisling behaviour.

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The Journal finds itself navigating a culture divide that has hit other sorts of companies. After the Charlottesville mayhem and the president's evident reluctance to single out white supremacists, almost every major-company CEO on the president's business counsel felt it necessary to resign - not least because of concerns about how their own employees, especially the younger ones, might react. Indeed, the president has been turned down in his efforts to secure legal help in the Russian-collusion investigation by nine major law firms. A worry for almost all of these firms was that representing Trump would cause anger if not outright rebellion among their younger members of staff.

Not long after the election, Baker held a meeting with a group of young reporters and editors at the Journal, many aghast over the paper's restraint. One young reporter, who announced that she had studied the history of genocide and that it starts with news organisations like the Journal and their willingness to normalise extremism, demanded that Baker explain why the Journal was collaborating.

This reflects the social and generational fragmentation of the nation, but it also reflects that most journalists have little experience in journalism - and, indeed, most will not be journalists for all that long.

The new journalism fraternity has framed the central journalism mission as involving how to get rid of Donald Trump. The leap of faith here is that we already know the story of Donald Trump and don't have to work to find it out - who he is, what he really wants, what he really means. And perhaps all we need to know is that Trump is Trump. He is worse than Nixon in the Post's view. He is an idiot and buffoon in the Times' view. Both papers have aligned themselves with forces (excuse me, sources) in the bureaucracy that want him gone and who are dishing up the leaks to prove his treachery and stupidity. It's certainly possible - likely even - that Trump represents nothing more than one of the great political bacchanals in history, an orgy of the preposterous and absurd. And it often seems his reign will be a short one. But if Trump turns out to be even, say, 30 per cent right in his shoot-from- the-hip approach to the nation's ills - if GDP growth exceeds three per cent, if unemployment falls below five per cent, if fewer American soldiers die under Trump than under Obama - then Baker's and the Journal's break with journalistic orthodoxy and long-shot bet on giving Trump a chance will be the journalism success story. If...

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