I admit that I like Michael Wolff's work. Most of his colleagues in the press don't. I've never been able to figure that out. And no, I don't want it explained, because I've heard it all, and find it unconvincing.

Yesterday I tweeted, to some acclaim, that he was right that the press is self-obsessed, as narcissistic as our president, and as a result, misses big stories that we really need them not to miss. 

For example...

We hear all the time, in the op-ed pages of venerated pubs, how Facebook is stifling the news, but never how Facebook is killing the web. A few very simple additions to Facebook would help bring the web into Facebook, but they are deaf to this. As is the press. Why? Presumably because it isn't 100 percent about them. 

Also when we hear how Facebook is stifling news, we never hear the other side, how news ceded its distribution to Facebook, and how we still don't know it wouldn't work, if the news industry just replicated what Facebook does, without the mistakes that Facebook makes. I think it would work. And as a user of news, I wish they would just do it. In America, we have a word for this -- competition, and like the First Amendment, it's one of our core values. You can't prove someone has a monopoly if you haven't even tried to compete with them. As the great Scoop Nisker says, "if you don't like the news, go out and make some of your own." That includes the news itself, imho.

Then just now I heard Jeff Jarvis, famous news-about-news pundit say, on the BBC News Hour, that journalism must be better at self-examination. Right there that's the bug. They need to not so much depend on self-examination, but rather learn how to listen to their users, not as amorphous mindless slurry, but as sentient beings.

For an industry whose existence depends on its ability to listen, news has become a ghoulish imitation of itself, sort of the Walking Dead of listening. They just can't do it. Most of what they do is recycle fumes. Yes there is some actual news in the fumes, esp in 2017 when the news is so rapid and real, but it would do better if instead of gradually reforming, news underwent a revolution of relevance. Let the people take over for a while. Find ways to radically listen. Extreme listening. It'll be painful at first, but no pain no gain. On the other side, we'll all be better for it. 

Which is the Truth of Trump in every way. He himself is a disaster. But he forces us to get off our butts and actually work with each other. And that means the press has to learn to work with people who criticize it, because in the criticism, is truth that the news industry has been scrupulously avoiding.