What Trump gets about the media
In his rally speech in Phoenix last week, President Trump complained about what he called “the very dishonest media,” and routinely on Twitter calls “fake news.” In Phoenix, Trump conceded that there are “some very fair journalists.” But he said that, “for the most part, honestly, these are really, really dishonest people, and they’re bad people. And I really think they don’t like our country.”
He went on to call the reporters and editors and producers “sick people.”
As is often the case with Trump, the rhetoric is so insulting and extreme that it’s hard to take the underlying point seriously. But, as also is often the case with Trump, he’s on to something real.
Most readers and viewers — and even most journalists I know, at least privately — will acknowledge that there really are substantial flaws and imperfections in how the press covers politics and policy.
A big part of it is the hype. Trump said “the crooked media . . . would rather get ratings and clicks than tell the truth.” It’s not always that binary a tradeoff, but Trump, a businessman, is correct to perceive that there are commercial incentives and imperatives, and that they don’t always, at least short term, push in the direction of journalistic quality.
The press has a tendency, instead, to prey on anxiety and magnify it: Neo-Nazis are taking over America! We’re headed to nuclear war with North Korea! Trump is going to round up and persecute all the immigrants/Muslims/transgender people!
When the predicted horror fails to materialize on time and or at the fully apocalyptic scale, the irresponsible media herd moves on to foment the next fear.
“Panic!” generates more page views and Facebook shares and retweets, and better ratings, than “Don’t Panic!”
Trump understands how this works because he plays a similarly shallow and breathless game, stoking public fear about Islamist terrorism, immigrant crime and foreign economic competition, and nursing it into a winning political movement.
If it feels like this is worse than it ever has been, it may be. Facebook and Google have sucked away much of the advertising revenue that used to support newspapers, while nightly network news viewership has been in a long decline since the days of Walter Cronkite or Peter Jennings.
As a result, newsrooms are smaller than they used to be. More experienced journalists have been laid off or offered buyouts and replaced with less savvy and less expensive newcomers.
In other words, Trump, like any bully, is picking on a weakling. This is true even though some big media outlets are now owned or partially owned by people even richer than Trump is — like Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, in the case of The New York Times; or Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, in the case of The Washington Post; or Apple heiress Laurene Powell Jobs, who just bought a stake in The Atlantic.
Hurling crude insults won’t make things any better. Calling the press “sick” or unpatriotic doesn’t make Americans any better informed. It may just deepen the already reflexive and entrenched hostility to Trump that widely prevails in American newsrooms.
Because another fact, if we’re honest, is ideological slant: Reporters for many big media organizations are left of center, and view Trump with disdain or alarm.
What would make things better? More competing news outlets, employing more reporters, editors and producers to spend less time gesticulating and more creating careful, sober reporting that provides context and perspective.
That can mean traveling to faraway places, digging through court documents, or helping readers have the information to draw informed conclusions for themselves about which Trump actions are genuinely alarming or unprecedented, and which are just things that every recent President has done.
There are a lot of “very fair journalists” — and hardworking ones — already doing this sort of work well. Some of them even work at the same outlets that Trump routinely describes as “failing” and “pathetic.” I’m a professional critic of The New York Times and I think that newspaper has damaged its reputation with its excessive Trumpbashing.
But it was from The Times that I learned that scrubbing government websites wasn’t some evidence of Trump totalitarianism, but rather typical practice at the beginning of a new administration. The Times reporters covering the Justice Department, writing about a Trump administration decision not to bring charges against a law enforcement official who shot and killed a minority civilian, reported, too, that such a charge would also have been unlikely in the Obama administration.
Funding such fine work at newspapers requires nonprofit donors, for-profit investors, or best of all, paying, revenue-generating subscriber-customers. Reading with independent-minded skepticism is always a good idea. Ironically enough, though, the most effective remedy for consumers who share Trump’s irritation with the media might just be to plunk down that credit card for a subscription.