From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.

And I'm Brooke Gladstone. Regular listeners know that this program is not made for media practitioners,

but for people who daily confront and consume media in all its forms, not just journalism,

but advertising video games and, of course,

vanity license plates. That said, this hour is about journalism and also reality. The first is a desperate suitor, the latter an increasingly elusive and capricious object of desire.

Journalism, spurned and frustrated, clearly is going about this all wrong.

I mean, if journalists are to fulfill their mission to inform and equip citizens to participate in our democracy,

they'll have to overturn decades of tradition.

They'll have to resist the reflex to view the president's every utterance as news.

They'll have to report on the context before the tweet and to choose which facts to check.

They'll have to use more independent judgment than they have in perhaps 100 years,

or leave the public to be seduced and abandoned.

In our research, it was mostly left-leaning political analysts who were publicly pondering

this challenge to the press, so it's their thoughts you'll hear.

This week's news, of course, was dominated by Donald Trump's final press conference as president-elect,

and it was bizarre.

His staffers came to literally cheer,

and the stage was set with a table stacked with prop files,

filled with pages Trump said he'd personally signed

to ensure no conflicts of interest. You could call it unprecedented, except that it's happened

before in Russia. As Alexei Kovalev noted in Medium, this is pretty much how Vladimir Putin

choreographs his rare press conferences.

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