This week president-elect Trump settled for $25 million a fraud suit alleging one of his past self-named businesses, the much-self-ballyhooed Trump University, was nothing more than an inglorious con meant to separate marks from tens of thousands of dollars while imparting little to no useful real estate "education." Let's take a look at how the news that the next President of the United States chose to settle a case accusing him of outright consumer fraud played out in the press compared to, say...
Perhaps before we too enamor ourselves of the notion that the national press can or is even interested in providing a check against the new and deeply flawed president's potential abuses of the public, we should wait for evidence—any evidence—of that happening.
Note that the Times has long been willing to hold a magnifying glass to certain politicians, but evidence suggests that attention is not based on the original reporting of Times reporters, but on whichever leaks or pseudo-scandals are fed to them by outside partisans. The most egregious recent non-Iraq-War-related example would be the silly treatment given Clinton Cash, a book whose supposed Clinton scandals were given hyperbolic coverage by the paper but which were soon debunked by other outlets who examined the "facts" beyond each claim; the reason the Times promoted the accusations were simply because someone brought those accusations to them.
Even after the claims of the book were discredited, the supposed scandals of the Clinton Foundation, a charity, were still given lavish attention not merely in the Times but by every other outlet not because wrongdoing was found, but because the accusations had been pre-packaged and shopped to those outlets. Every continuing story would repeat the theme; no credible evidence of impropriety, but an interviewed partisan decrying the "optics" of the thing charged.
Similarly, the supposed "email" scandal, which before that was once the "Benghazi" scandal, has been fueled in the pages of the press not by noteworthy developments or discovered improprieties, but by an ongoing stream of fact-fudging leaks from House Republicans seeking to stoke the story. We can refer to this as the Ken Starr model, because it is rote enough to have become such.
The news that the Trump Foundation engaged in multiple acts of blatant self-dealing still, to this day, receives the attention of only a handful of dedicated reporters. Ask the public what the underlying scandal of Trump University was, even after Trump settled the charges against him, and they're not likely to have heard. Trump's outrageous supposition that putting his companies in the care of his family members constitutes sufficient distancing, as his hotels court foreign business under the suggestion of increased presidential access, appears to be considered by editors to be too esoteric a concern to grab the attention.
The difference appears to be a product of the continued media dedication to access journalism of a specific sort; specifically, it is quick and cheap to report that so-and-so, a partisan, has such-and-such to say about a true scandal or a false one, while it is both considerably more boring and considerably more time-consuming to determine whether anything they claim is true. A true scandal may not have developments for large stretches of time; powerful people grunting about apperances, however, are always one call away.
The conventions of cable news are, more and more, becoming the conventions of newspaper front pages. To repeat: before we too enamor ourselves of the nation that the national press is willing to become that critically important public check against a new president's potential abuses, we should wait for evidence—any evidence—of that happening.