Like dogs and cats, snakes and rats, journalists and the government are not supposed to be friends.
It is always going to be a fractious, difficult relationship. We, the voters and taxpayers, grant politicians enormous power and resources to run the government on our behalf. The media’s job is to make sure they do it responsibly and ethically.
As the American newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst reportedly once said, “news is whatever someone doesn’t want printed; all else is advertising”.
The natural order of things
requires there to be a necessary tension between those two institutions. But mutual hostility isn’t necessarily always a good thing.