I corrected the attorney general. He didn’t go back far enough.

Attorney General Todd Blanche was talking about the fight between President Trump and the press when he said something that stopped me.

He talked about “years and years” of one-sided media coverage of Trump.

I had to correct him.

Not because he was wrong.

Because he didn’t go back nearly far enough.

We’re not talking about years and years. We’re talking about decades and decades.

The current battle over CNN, MS NOW and Politico didn’t suddenly appear when Donald Trump walked into politics. Trump changed the way a Republican president responds to the press, certainly. But the adversarial relationship I’m talking about has been around a very long time.

I started running through the presidents on the show.

Dwight Eisenhower may have been the last Republican president who got anything resembling decent treatment, and even then Richard Nixon was taking fire as his vice president. Nixon became president and we know what happened there. Gerald Ford became a national punchline. Ronald Reagan was routinely portrayed as some combination of dangerous and intellectually inadequate. George H.W. Bush got his turn. Then George W. Bush got his.

And then came Donald Trump.

My point wasn’t that every criticism of every Republican president was unfair. Richard Nixon gave the press plenty to investigate. Spiro Agnew didn’t resign because somebody wrote a mean editorial.

The point is the pattern I see in the institutional culture.

That’s why I laughed when Blanche called it “years and years.”

Attorney General, you’re going to need a bigger calendar.

The latest version of this argument is over White House access. CNN’s Brian Stelter says Trump’s use of “fake news” is about delegitimizing journalism and giving the president the power to decide what is real. Jake Tapper pressed the administration over CNN being kept from a pool assignment and pointed to the danger of presidents deciding which organizations get to cover them.

Those arguments deserve to be heard.

But so does the other one.

The administration’s position, as it was presented on the programs I played, is that access to the White House and Air Force One is not an unlimited entitlement and that the president has legitimate complaints about inaccurate or agenda-driven reporting. The broader dispute remains tied up in litigation.

Here’s where I think this gets interesting.

The press keeps defending itself by talking about the importance of a free press.

I agree.

But “free press” and “perfect press” aren’t synonyms.

Freedom of the press means government doesn’t get to dictate what journalists say. It doesn’t mean journalists are magically freed from bias, mistakes, groupthink or agendas of their own. It certainly doesn’t mean the public is obligated to trust them.

And this is where Miles Davis unexpectedly wandered into my argument.

Philip was in the studio Monday, and when it was time to kick off our musical adventure, he chose Bitches Brew.

Now, I love Philip’s taste in music. The man has a Coltrane T-shirt that makes me jealous every time he wears it.

But Bitches Brew?

I told the truth.

I didn’t like it the first time I heard it.

So I went back and listened again.

Still didn’t like it.

That’s when a musician friend explained something to me. Don’t just listen to whether you like it, he essentially told me. Understand what you’re hearing. Look at the musicians on that record. Understand what Miles was doing and what that album helped set in motion with jazz fusion.

Chick Corea. Wayne Shorter. The musicians surrounding Miles. An entire direction in modern music was emerging from those sessions.

Did that conversation magically make Bitches Brew my favorite Miles Davis record?

No.

But it made me understand it differently. You don’t have to like something to understand it.

And you don’t have to trust an institution to believe it should be free.

That’s where I part company with some of the simplistic arguments surrounding this White House press fight.

I can believe strongly in freedom of the press while also believing much of the national press has earned the distrust it now complains about.

Those ideas aren’t contradictory.

In fact, if you’re a journalist, that distinction ought to matter more to you than it does to me.

Instead of spending another television segment telling Americans why they must trust you, ask why so many don’t.

Maybe some of those people are partisan. Maybe some simply don’t like hearing information that challenges what they already believe.

But maybe the press should consider another possibility.

Maybe some of the criticism is deserved.

Miles Davis didn’t change Bitches Brew because I didn’t like it. Somebody helped me understand what I was hearing.

The national media might try something similar.

Stop demanding applause.

Explain the record.

— Bo