Since the election of Donald Trump we have been told a great many things about what it actually means.
We have been told that the media misread the mood of the American public - yet more members of that public voted for his opponent, a person we were told on the campaign trail was a criminal and utterly discredited, than for Trump.
We are told that media should report Trump's campaign accurately - a campaign that loudly vowed to lock its chief opponent up but now says it will do nothing of the kind.
We have been told that the media needs to look at itself - by a person who complains about impersonations on comedy shows, the kind of pictures that newspapers use of him and attention to his business affairs. And for every complaint by Trump, there are hundreds of emails and social media posts that suggest the same thing in far less measured terms.
To students of international politics, this sort of thing is familiar from states such as the People's Republic of China, Erdogan's Turkey and Putin's Russia. These people do not look forward to an improved media or a reformed media or a more aggressive media. They look forward to a media that has left the field or which complies with the edicts of a new order, changing its tune from one moment to the next on someone's whim.
If the media is to prove its worth at such a time, now more than ever it needs to look outward and to call self-serving cant and hypocrisy when it sees it, regardless of who it comes from. That should trump every other consideration.
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