A disaster for the media? That would be good news.

During the 1992 presidential race I saw a bumper sticker (on Bill’s car, if I’m not mistaken) that read “Annoy the media, vote for Bush.” Since then, I’ve seen corresponding stickers supporting most GOP presidential candidates.

This year, a better slogan might be “[Expletive] the media, vote for Trump.” It would be a tempting invitation.

The Washington Post increases the temptation with an op-ed called “A second Trump presidency would be a disaster for the news media.” The author is Leonard Downie Jr., a former executive editor of the Post who advocates that newsrooms “move beyond objectivity.”

The Post does this with a vengeance, as do other leading mainstream media outlets. The whole Trump-as-collaborator-with Russia hoax, peddled relentlessly by the Post, is Exhibit A. This fictitious scandal bogged the Trump administration down for more than half of his term, until Robert Mueller’s report finally deflated it.

I don’t blame Trump for wanting to strike back at the media. However, I would blame him if he did this at the expense of the First Amendment.

Keeping in mind both the damage the left-liberal media inflicts on America with its non-stop, deceitful propaganda and the dictates of the First Amendment, let’s examine Downie’s bill of particulars.

Downie begins, as he should, with a discussion of Trump’s first term. He writes:

What could Trump do to the news media and their ability to inform the American people? Judging by what he did in his first term, plenty.

Really? Did the mainstream media experience a “disaster” during Trump’s first term? No. Was it curbed in any meaningful way? Not that I noticed. The media proceeded unimpeded with fake news about Trump, including the Russia collusion hoax.

Downie sees it differently:

As president, Trump habitually attacked the news media and individual journalists as “fake news” and “the enemy of the people,” undermining public trust in the fact-finding press.

He called for boycotts of news organizations and changes to libel laws to restrict critical reporting on public figures, including himself. His political campaign filed libel suits, ultimately unsuccessful, against The Washington Post, the New York Times and CNN over opinion columns critical of him.

Just as news media and individual journalists have the right habitually to attack the president, the president has the right to attack back. Downie cites no support in the First Amendment or elsewhere for his assumption that the media should be exempt from such criticism. It’s part of the give-and-take of a healthy democracy.

In fighting back against criticism he finds unfair, the president should also be able to request that his followers tune out the sources he deems most unfair. CNN, the outlet discussed in Downie’s link, fits that description.

Yet, strangely, Trump agreed to have CNN host one of his two debates with Joe Biden. He also did an interview with the insufferable Trump-hater Kaitlan Collins of CNN. Big mistakes, in my view, but hardly a harbinger of future oppression of hostile media outlets.

Nor, in my view, did the media face disaster due to libel suits by Trump or his campaign. These suits were unsuccessful, as Downie acknowledges, and the libel laws are such that future suits are likely to fail, as well.

What about seeking changes in these laws, though? Two points about that. First, Trump has no power to change the law of defamation.

Second, Downie assumes, without discussion, that American defamation law is sacrosanct. It isn’t.

In Great Britain, defamation law makes it easier than here successfully to sue media outlets and journalists. I take no position on which of these two democracies has it right. My point is that democracy has not “died in darkness” in Britain. Democracy is alive and well there.

Downie continues:

[Trump] tried to deny White House press credentials for reporters and news media whose stories he disliked. He closed White House visitor logs to the press and the public. For months at a time, the White House and State Department refused to hold daily on-the-record press briefings. Federal departments scrubbed from their websites information and resources about climate change, the Affordable Care Act and women’s health, among other subjects.

I’m against denying access to reporters and outlets a president doesn’t like. But Trump did not succeed in excluding anyone. Moreover, the Obama administration tried to inflict similar treatment Fox News.

The petty harassment Downie describes is not a genuine threat to the media, in any case. A leftist reporter denied press credentials will be replaced by another leftist reporter. And there are enough anti-Trump outlets to fill any void that might be created by the permanent exclusion of one, should it come to that (which it almost certainly won’t).

Downie doesn’t attempt to show any real-world adverse consequences to holding fewer than daily press briefings. As to “federal departments,” they have no obligation to include on their websites content pertaining to the left-liberal media’s hobby-horses.

Next, Downie complains:

Trump’s Justice Department increased leak investigations and prosecutions of journalists’ sources of classified information, including secret seizures of phone records of reporters at The Post, the Times and CNN. “We only learned how invasive these probes were many months into the Biden presidency,” said Bruce D. Brown, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

Downie doesn’t contend that these leak investigations and prosecutions were unlawful; nor does he even show that they were improper. Government leaks can be quite harmful to national security and other important interests. In my view, such leaks deserve to be investigated and, where appropriate, prosecuted.

In any event, neither the mainstream media nor Trump-hating bureaucrats was deterred by such investigations and prosecutions. Leaking was a way of life in Washington, D.C. during Trump’s first term. Unfortunately, Trump couldn’t even deter his own staff members from leaking to the media.

In sum, unless Trump tries to break new ground in a second administration, the media will not be harmed in any significant way if the former president is elected.

Let’s turn, then, to what Downie has to way about media relations in a second Trump term. He opens with this quote from Trump:

I say up front, openly and proudly, that when I WIN the Presidency of the United States, they and others of the LameStream Media will be thoroughly scrutinized for their knowingly dishonest and corrupt coverage of people, things, and events. The Fake News Media should pay a big price for what they have done to our once great Country.

The mainstream media should be thoroughly scrutinized. As an old Dartmouth English professor used to say, “You don’t just read the book, the book reads you.”

Furthermore, the news media should pay a big price for its dishonest reporting. But it shouldn’t be the government that exacts the price.

Downie points to no statement by Trump specifying an action he might take against the media. Instead, quoting various journalism professors, he lists actions that Trump “could” take.

Some of them are things Trump did in his first term. I discussed these measures above.

Some are actions that seem reasonable to me. This includes prosecuting reporters under the Espionage Act for reporting about classified information and rescinding the Biden Justice Department’s guidelines for police treatment of reporters covering demonstrations.

One professor worries that Trump’s “vicious vitriol” might “mobilize his followers online to attack journalists and the press.” It might.

But the left’s vitriol, including some from the mainstream media and from leading Democrats, probably led to the shooting of conservative legislators and an attempted attack on a Supreme Court Justice. I don’t see Downie or his journalism professors worrying about the consequences of the media’s absurd attempt to paint Justice Alito as an insurrectionist sympathizer.

One critic told Downie he fears Trump “using government power to shut down any of the press that’s critical of him.” It’s far-fetched to think that Trump would try this and impossible to believe that, if he did, he could make it stick. So, too, with some of the other horribles the journalism profs parade.

The funniest passage in Downie’s rant if this one:

The Biden administration’s treatment of the media has been an almost complete reversal of this hostility. There have been no verbal or legal attacks on journalists. Regular news briefings have resumed, and media access to government agencies and information, including the White House visitor logs, has increased. The news media’s primary complaint has been that President Biden holds too few news conferences and sit-down interviews.

And let’s not forget Biden’s release of the tape of his interview with the special counsel who investigated him. Wait! You mean Biden is blocking that release?

Naturally, Biden has treated the press well overall. It’s unreservedly on his side. If the press treated Trump this well, he would be its friend, too — the way he was with Fox News during his first term.

Here’s the second funniest passage:

As for Trump’s “insulting, professionally demeaning” rhetoric about the news media, Brown said, “it is very important to not let him get inside our heads. The media will need to focus on what really crosses the lines.”

Trump has been inside the heads of news media types for almost nine years. And don’t count on Downie to “focus on what really crosses the lines.” His op-ed is a compendium of media whining about things that don’t cross the line.

At least Downie got the headline right. A second Trump term would be a disaster for the mainstream media. Not because Trump would likely harm it in any meaningful way, but because the media hates Trump and most of his policies.

That’s the sense in which a vote for Trump would [expletive] the media.