A View Inside ‘The Fourth Estate’ During Trump’s First Year

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Two weeks after the 2016 election, President-elect Donald J. Trump was in the middle of making the press rounds and had scheduled a meeting with The New York Times. But on the morning of Nov. 22, The Times learned via Twitter that Mr. Trump was canceling. He claimed that the “failing” New York Times had changed the conditions — “not nice.” The paper held its ground, saying it was the Trump team who had tried to change the rules when he asked that the meeting be off the record, which it had refused. Hours later, the president-elect changed course, tweeting the meeting was back on: “Look forward to it!”

That day, I was sitting at my desk, trying to figure out, as a filmmaker, how to make sense of the seismic political shift that had occurred. Everyone I knew was doing the same thing. Calls with ideas for films had been flying in since Mr. Trump’s win — people trying to get a handle on a future that they had not prepared for, that they desperately wanted to engage with. Nothing felt quite right — nothing felt big enough — until that morning. Scanning Mr. Trump’s Twitter feed, I thought, “I want to be a fly on the wall for that meeting.” Now all I had to do was convince The Times!

Respect for the First Amendment is in my DNA. My father was a civil liberties lawyer; he fought for Lenny Bruce’s right to offend when his comedy routine violated New York’s obscenity statutes in 1964, and for American neo-Nazis’ right to march in 1978 in the Chicago suburb of Skokie, Ill., where many Holocaust survivors lived. Now we have a sitting president who called the free press “the enemy of the people,” frequently singling out The Times for derision his bully pulpit.

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It seemed to me that story was extraordinary from The Times’s point of view as well. How would the organization take stock of this new era, one that it — and its peers — hadn’t fully understood during the 2016 election, and rethink coverage amid a chaotic administration with little transparency?

I reached out to an old friend, Jonathan Mahler, who writes for The Times Magazine, and he introduced me to the editor Sam Dolnick. We had coffee in The Times’s cafeteria and I made my pitch: I wanted to tell the story of the first year of the Trump presidency, as seen through the eyes of the journalists on the front lines covering it. Sam seemed open, and he brought me to meet the executive editor, Dean Baquet. To my great pleasure and even greater surprise, Dean liked it. “I get it,” he said.

So I was granted access, but it was left to each individual reporter to decide if he or she wanted to cooperate. I went to Washington and made the rounds. Reactions ranged from thoughtful — “How will you handle the feelings of my colleagues you have not included” — to skeptical — “I wish you would have done this during the Obama administration, when they went after the press and leaks with unprecedented muscle” — to very skeptical — “I’ll go work at Pain Quotidien when your cameras are around.”

I understood quickly that what the journalists prized the most, and would protect most fiercely, was the confidentiality of their sources. Sometimes people conflate the work that documentary filmmakers do with that of journalists, but in this one respect, it is very, very different. We tell our stories by getting subjects to open up to us on camera or to allow us to follow them through their lives. For journalists covering Washington, allowing sources to speak anonymously can be the key to getting the facts. And while the life and testimony of one person may make for a great film, in journalism it is never enough to have just one.

Still, why did The Times open itself to anyone in such a way? There were so many reasons for it not to. It might be that the organization’s leaders understood that at a time when journalism was under attack from the highest powers in the land, it might not be a bad idea to show the public exactly what it is that real journalists actually do. I am excited to invite the world in to see what I saw, to be that fly on the wall along with me during this most extraordinary year.