In a piece written for The Atlantic that was published on Thursday, Alexander Nazaryan, a national correspondent for Yahoo News, wrote how he misses the "thrill" of covering the Trump administration, saying it was comparable to the American soldiers who stormed the beaches at Normandy during D-Day.
Nazaryan made numerous references to Nazi Germany to say the Trump administration acted in a similar fashion, but noting, "I miss it already. I miss it terribly, even if I miss little else about the past four years."
He then goes on to compare himself and the other journalists who covered Trump to the soldiers who fought actual Nazis during World War II:
"Covering the administration was thrilling for many journalists, in the way that I imagine storming Omaha Beach must have been for a 20-year-old fresh from the plains of Kansas. He hadn’t signed up for battle, but there he was, liberating France. France, by the way, is where Trump called American soldiers who’d fallen in combat 'suckers' and 'losers.' When this magazine first reported those comments, Trump’s supporters denounced the Atlantic story as preposterous and offensive, even as outlet after outlet confirmed the reporting. They failed to realize that the preposterous and the offensive were the twin beacons of the Trump presidency. Journalists were merely going where he led. This was our Omaha Beach. I, for one, would have rather been in Hawaii."
A silver lining to such a self-aggrandizing piece is Nazaryan outing himself as thinking he's much more important than he actually is. But unfortunately, he's not alone among the Beltway press corps in thinking that way.
If you've followed my work from the past year, you know I've covered some intense and dangerous situations for Townhall. It's hard work, and yet I enjoy covering such events as I believe it is important to document them in real-time. That said, even when there were fires, lawlessness, and gunfire, I made it a point to never compare where I was to being in a war zone, as those are much more perilous.
There are certainly reporters of the past when journalism was an honorable profession who went to war zones, like Ernie Pyle and Joseph Galloway. Pyle covered American troops during World War II, often being on the frontlines to tell their stories. In his work, he made it a point to say he was no hero compared to the young men he was reporting on despite being in dangerous situations with them. How far has journalism fallen.