Reporting Trump’s First Year: The Fourth Estate, review: a powerful reminder of the need for a free press

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Julie Hirschfeld Davis, White House Correspondent, and Elisabeth Bumiller, Washington Bureau Chief, during Trump's first speech to Congress
Julie Hirschfeld Davis, White House Correspondent, and Elisabeth Bumiller, Washington Bureau Chief, during Trump's first speech to Congress Credit: BBC

For anyone interested in the often fraught relationship between politics and the media, Reporting Trump’s First Year: The Fourth Estate (BBC Two) was a big draw. Documentaries exploring the internal workings of newspapers are nothing new but Liz Garbus’s series about The New York Times promised particularly rich pickings, capturing the embattled mood at the newspaper during the USA’s most turbulent political period in living memory.

Garbus, a two-time Emmy-winning documentary maker, was embedded with the Times at its Manhattan HQ and at its critically important Washington outpost for 16 eventful months. The opening shots dropped us straight into the action, with senior news editors in New York watching Donald Trump’s inauguration address and liaising with the Washington Bureau on exactly what editorial response to make.

“It’s going to be hard but it’s a great story,” said executive editor Dean Baquet in the opening episode’s only moment of understatement. 

It covered Trump’s first three months in office – when just about all the traditional rules of presidential behaviour (not to mention various members of Trump’s top team) were shredded on a daily basis.

As such, in terms of depicting the extraordinarily feverish pace of life in the modern media (where seconds can make the difference between a major scoop and a busted flush), the cut and thrust of dealing with an openly hostile president (repeatedly calling the US news media “the enemy of the people”) with little or no regard for that holiest of high journalistic virtues, the truth, Garbus delivered on that promise. In particular, the key role of the press in flagging up the Trump campaign’s links to Russia loomed very large indeed.

But there was also something missing in Garbus’s account: any sense that a newspaper is made for readers, or anyone other than journalists and wonks, for instance. Or that those working for it might have political agendas of their own.

Certainly, this opening episode was far from the greatest portrait of a newspaper ever made. But as a snapshot of how politics is evolving, of how Trump-style populism cynically sets out to erode public confidence in the media’s role as a holder-to-account of politicians and the powerful, it was breathtakingly effective in reminding us of the crucial role of a strong, free press in any truly democratic society.