Politics used to be covered as a kind of a sport, but it doesn’t feel like that anymore. (John King of CNN was jeered for calling vote counting “fun” on election night.) And despite the television glamour and lucrative book contracts that flooded in for reporters in the Trump era, the real work of reporting is painstaking and exhausting: getting people, one by one, to tell you things they should not, and then telling your readers about them.
Ms. Haberman was particularly well-suited for this journalistic moment because of her sheer relentlessness and hunger, and her lack of smug self-satisfaction. She seems to need to prove herself every day. She texts while she drives, talks while she eats, parents while she reports, tweets and regrets it, doomscrolls. She hates Twitter so much she stepped back from the platform in 2018 and wrote an Op-Ed about it, and then started tweeting again. (Relatable!)
For the last four years, she has been the human incarnation of a nation riveted, like it or not, by Mr. Trump, a reporter driven by a kind of curiosity that feels more like compulsion to find out what is going on — and has dragged us all along for the harrowing ride.
“She has been the dominant reporter on the Trump White House beat for four years, and it’s not really close,” said Jonathan Swan of Axios, one of her fiercest competitors for breaking news. He described her as “the bane of my existence for the past four years,” adding, “I get high anxiety most days wondering what she will break that I should have had.”
I know the feeling. I learned to report from Maggie — and to fear her — in City Hall in New York, where she was a reporter for The New York Post, and where she first covered Donald Trump. When I arrived in 2001, Ms. Haberman cut a striking figure there: She wore a leather jacket and smoked cigarettes on the building’s iconic front steps, chatting with the cops.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/08/business/media/trump-maggie-haberman.html
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