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Situational Journalistic Professionalism

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I watched John Stewart interview CNN’s Caitlin Collins today. One could not help but be impressed by her steady professionalism. But at the same time I had to wonder, where was this kind of professionalism during the Biden administration? What I saw at the time was a press corps that often behaved more like a rabid mob. I didn’t hear much talk about journalistic professionalism at the time. Instead they repeatedly defended their overtly combative reporting as central to their journalistic duty to “get to the truth.”

It made me wonder how much of this talk about journalistic professionalism is a reaction to Trump; a posture, defense, and excuse adopted to protect themselves from criticism that they are too timid with this President. It made me wonder where those aggressive reporters from the Biden press room were today?

The White House press corps likes to imagine itself as a principled institution: adversarial but civil, skeptical but professional, always serving the public rather than its own performance. On paper, that’s even their job description — ask hard questions, shine light, hold the president to account. In practice, though, what we see looks less like fixed journalistic integrity and more like situational professionalism: the tone changes depending on which president is standing at the podium and how much disrespect the room can get away with — not how much respect the president actually deserves.

Look at Joe Biden’s Geneva press conference in 2021. CNN’s Kaitlan Collins shouted a question as Biden was leaving the stage, pressing him on why he was “so confident” Vladimir Putin would change his behavior after their meeting. Biden turned back, visibly irritated, and snapped, “Where the hell — what do you do all the time?” before later telling her she might be “in the wrong business” if she couldn’t see the meeting’s value. He eventually apologized, but the exchange is revealing: the press felt free to crowd him, shout questions, and keep pressing until they got a reaction.

That dynamic shows up again in the Biden-era briefings. In one 2024 age-and-debate fallout briefing, while reporters were pressing the White House for Biden to address his future directly, an off‑camera reporter quipped “If he’s awake” about the president. NBC’s Kelly O’Donnell immediately called it “inappropriate,” and the press secretary echoed that judgment. But the line only happened because the room had drifted into a mode where casually disrespectful asides about the president’s faculties felt thinkable in the first place.

Those moments aren’t isolated glitches. They sit on top of a structural reality that Biden “probably takes more questions overall” and does frequent informal Q&A, which gives the corps more opportunities to shout, overlap, and push. You end up with a press environment where the president’s openness becomes an invitation: the more he tolerates the noise, the more the corps turns toughness into a kind of blood sport.

Now set that next to Donald Trump’s long, combative press interactions. The man who called “fake news” the “enemy of the people” over and over again made the press into a personal foil, publicly attacking outlets and individual reporters from the podium and on social media. In one notorious coronavirus briefing, Trump literally played a campaign‑style video attacking the media’s coverage before lashing out at reporters who questioned his response, insisting “everything we did was right” while the media was “guilty”. CNN and MSNBC cut away and labeled the video propaganda. That’s not a calm professional exchange; it’s a president turning the briefing itself into a weapon against the press.

The Charlottesville press conference in 2017 fits the same pattern. Trump took questions in an aggressively defensive tone, arguing “both sides” were to blame and sparring with reporters about CEOs resigning from his manufacturing council and whether the violence counted as terrorism. The transcript reads like a tense negotiation, with the press trying to hold him to clear moral language while he pushes back on their framing. It’s adversarial, but the corps largely sticks to a more formal, single‑voice question pattern instead of the shouted swarm you see in some Biden clips.

Put bluntly: when the president reliably punches back, calls the press “fake news,” and threatens access, professionalism is a posture the press adopts as a defense. When the president absorbs the blows and apologizes, “professionalism” loosens into jokes about whether he’s awake and shouted questions that run right up to the line of personal disrespect. The standard isn’t the same; the risk profile is.

This is where “situational professionalism” comes in. If you only listened to the self‑image of the press corps, you’d think there was one unified ethic: adversarial, serious, fair. But the examples tell a different story:

  • With Biden, openness to questions correlates with the corps becoming louder, more overlapping, and sometimes casually derisive and contemptuous, because the likely consequence is at worst a scolding and later apology.
  • With Trump, the corps often presents a more pious, ceremonious face even while asking pointed questions, because retaliation — rhetorical and institutional — is a real threat.

The White House Correspondents’ Association itself emphasizes the noble language: “It is our job to report on the president… to shine a light and hold the government accountable,” framed as a tradition grounded in the First Amendment. That’s fine in theory. But when the everyday practice shifts based on how much pushback a given president will deliver, what we’re watching is less a fixed code and more a calibration: how far can we go today without paying for it tomorrow?

In that sense, civility for the corps becomes a function of the president’s temperament rather than a consistent journalistic principle. The same reporter who is comfortable shouting at a departing Biden may choose a more tightly controlled question with Trump, not because the underlying issues are less serious, but because the cost of triggering the president is higher. Professionalism becomes a slider, not a standard.

None of this means every reporter in the room is insincere. There are people who clearly try to keep the focus on the substance rather than on their own reactions or one‑liners, and there are moments when colleagues clamp down on crossings of the line, as O’Donnell did with the “if he’s awake” remark. But the broader pattern is hard to ignore if you watch enough of this stuff in sequence: the corps will happily perform toughness when the president lets them, and tout their restraint when the president punishes them.

If professionalism is only strict when retaliation is looming, then it’s not really professionalism. It’s self‑preservation in formal clothing. And if journalists want the public to trust that they’re acting on principle rather than opportunism, they need to close that gap: be just as careful with their tone when the president is easy to shout at as when he is itching to declare them the enemy of the people.

Otherwise, “professionalism” risks becoming just another situational costume — something the press corps puts on or takes off depending on who’s standing at the podium, how much they think they can get away with that day, and whether aggressiveness or respectfulness serves them better.

Trump Believes

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Classic newswriting practice discourages the use of subjective words like “believes,” “thinks,” and “feels” because they imply an inner state of mind that cannot be independently verified by reporters. Instead, journalists are generally advised to rely on neutral attribution verbs such as “said,” “stated,” or “told reporters.” When distance or skepticism is warranted, words like “claimed,” “asserted,” or “suggested” can signal that the outlet is reporting an allegation or interpretation rather than endorsing it as fact.

Yet in normal political coverage, “believe” is frequently used. Writers routinely say things like “Democrats believe” or “the mayor believes.” That isn’t normally a problem. Used this way, “believes” stops short of endorsing the belief as fact while still capturing that someone is expressing more than a single, isolated quote; it gestures at a broader worldview.

In the context of Trump, however, many otherwise reasonable norms become problematic. When the word “believes” is used to characterize assertions made by Trump or his administration, it becomes subtly misleading. Trump strains or breaks many norms, including the use of the word “believes” to describe his frequently shifting claims. If reporters use the word “believes” to suggest a coherent worldview, that framing is often inaccurate in his case.

Describing statements by Trump and his administration as sincere “beliefs” does more than attribute an inner mental state or suggest a worldview; it risks conferring a kind of moral and epistemic dignity. A belief can be wrong, even wildly wrong, but it usually suggests some sincerity, some continuity, and some relation to evidence as the believer understands it—some sense that, if the world looked different, the belief might eventually yield.

None of that is typically true with Trump. Few of the disingenuous claims he spouts at any given moment can be legitimately called beliefs, apart from some of his most openly spiteful or ideologically consistent ones.

To many readers, “Trump believes” often feels not merely imprecise but almost perverse. It sounds like a credibility upgrade, a quiet promotion from “he says this” to “this is how reality appears inside his sincere inner life.” Even when the rest of the sentence and the surrounding reporting are fully critical—fact-checks, counterevidence, context—the verb itself grates, because it conflicts with the reader’s core assessment: that Trump does not believe in the ordinary sense so much as deploy statements. In that frame, “believes” is not a neutral label; it is an inaccurate and undeserved benefit of the doubt.

The problem is compounded by how small words are processed as we read them. Readers rarely stop on “claims,” “says,” or “argues.” These are background verbs that their brains skip over. But “believes” stands out. It draws attention to itself because it imports psychology. This may help explain why journalists use it; it can subtly signal interpretive authority and make a piece feel more insider-informed.

Because “believes” stands out, once you notice its misuse in regard to Trump, it tends to keep surfacing. Each instance can leave the impression that the writer or outlet is softening or normalizing Trump’s unrelentingly false claims and arguments.

It is unfortunate that, like many things strained by Trump, we can no longer take for granted the otherwise benign use of a word like “believes.” News writers should be far more careful about describing claims by Trump or his administration as “beliefs.”