Longtime White House reporter: President demeans office by attacking press

by Alison Kaiser

Retired CBS Radio reporter Peter Maer is a fan of President Trump’s tweeting, but not the poor relationship he has with the press.

Maer was an accomplished White House correspondent who covered every president from Jimmy Carter to Barack Obama before retiring three years ago. He spoke to us this week about the political beat.

Maer said Obama was the first president to use social media to address the public, adding he didn’t recall if the 44th president ever used Twitter “to attack or criticize or get involved in a fight.”

But for “our current Commander in Tweet,” as Maer called Trump, the news media is treated more like a rival.

“I really think it demeans the office of the president when the president calls the press the enemy of the people,” Maer said.

He said that it’s the job of journalists to report what the president says and tweets and ignore the harsh criticism. Give the news “straight up,” he added.

As for Trump’s tweeting, “I think it’s great that he communicates by Twitter. We certainly get the full measure of the man when he says some of the things he does.”

Although Maer is used to reporting the news, he was once inadvertently a part of the story when he was roughed up by Soviet Union security while trailing former President Ronald Reagan in Moscow.

He survived to tell the story.

Alison Kaiser is a senior at Pinkerton Academy in Derry, N.H.