Ted Koppel: Washington Post, NYT have 'decided' Trump is 'bad for the United States'

Story featured by Fox News, Washington Post and others.

Legendary news anchor Ted Koppel lamented that the Washington Post, the New York Times and the "liberal media" are not covering President Donald Trump objectively.

"We're talking about organizations that I believe have in fact decided as organizations that Donald J. Trump is bad for the United States. We have things appearing on the front page of the New York Times right now that never would have appeared 50 years ago -- analysis, commentary, on the front page," Koppel said on Thursday during an event with former CBS correspondent Marvin Kalb, author of the book, "Enemy of the People."

"So his perception that the establishment press is out to get him doesn’t mean that great journalism is not being done. It is. But the notion that most of us look upon Donald Trump as being an absolute fiasco -- he’s not mistaken in that perception and he’s not mistaken when so many of the liberal media, for example, described themselves as belonging to the resistance. What does that mean?" he added.

Koppel told Kalb, "I disagree with you Marvin. We are not the reservoir of objectivity that I think we were."

Both Koppel and Kalb said there is no modern day Walter Cronkite in broadcast news.

"The middle is missing" in journalism today, Koppel said.

Koppel was asked if Trump's criticism of the media has endangered the press reporting overseas. In his answer, Koppel referred to Trump as "an enemy of the press."

"The impact overseas has less to do with what is happening in journalism here in the United States than it does with the perception that an American president, who Republican or Democrat, I think, has always been perceived in the past as frustrated by the press, occasionally angered by the press, but never an enemy of the press in the sense that we are hearing now -- that has to have an impact in countries where there are fewer institutional protections than here in the United States for the nature of journalism," Koppel said.