What journalism is about is to attack everybody,” said the late Warren Hinckle, the sometime editor of Ramparts, according to his obituary in The New York Times this past August. (See Peter Collier’s feature earlier in this issue.) “First you decide what’s wrong, then you go out to find the facts to support that view, and then you generate enough controversy to attract attention.” Though the article, by William Grimes, seems to associate this attitude with what it calls “the no-holds-barred reporting style known as gonzo journalism,” it could also describe the approach to the news implicitly advocated on the paper’s front page a couple of weeks earlier by Jim Rutenberg:

If you’re a working journalist and you believe that Donald J. Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalistic tendencies, that he cozies up to anti-American dictators, and that he would be dangerous with control of the United States nuclear codes, how the heck are you supposed to cover him? Because if you believe all of those things, you have to throw out the textbook American journalism has been using for the better part of the past half- century, if not longer, and approach it in a way you’ve never approached anything in your career. If you view a Trump presidency as something that’s potentially dangerous, then your reporting is going to reflect that. You would move closer than you’ve ever been to being oppositional. That’s uncomfortable and uncharted territory for