SHOOING THE MESSENGER
Faced with a hostile media, the White House needs to fight fire with fire
CALL it the Battle of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
On one side: the perpetually aggrieved White House press corps, whose members sit atop journalism’s pinnacle and yet are herded like cattle, made to stand behind rope lines and are generally treated with disdain by those they report on. Like fantasy- l eague baseball players, they’re convinced they can run the country better than the officials they so resentfully cover.
On the other: a beleaguered, mediaconscious president who still harbors the notion that he can get dedicated ideological enemies to like him if he can just charm themenoughandis prepared to go around them on Twitter if he can’t.
Asthe Trumpadministration revamps its communications operation yet again in the wake of the short-lived Anthony Scaramucci era, it’s time to face the fact that this is no longer an exercise in public relations, or even messaging strategy. This is war. Take last week’s dust-up between CNN’s mouthy correspondent Jim Acosta and sharp-edged administration spokesman Stephen Miller, a senior adviser for policy, over — incredibly — whether the Emma Lazarus poem at the Statue of Liberty articulates American immigration policy. (It doesn’t.) Insisting that new immigrants conform to old standards, including having desirable skills and not going on public assistance, isn’t “racist,” it’s common sense.
But there’s the problem: No longer content to be merely adversarial when necessary in its pursuit of information, the media’s now almost wholly partisan — the propaganda wing of the Democratic National Committee, which takes literally the fictional admonition “to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,” not realizing it was meant as both a joke and a caution by a Chicago newspaperman more than a century ago.
Meanwhile, liberal newspapers like The Washington Post (owned by Amazon tycoon Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man) openly troll for “leaked” documents via secure Internet drop boxes in order to derail the Trump train. The Post’s Thursday publication of leaked transcripts of the president’s private conversations with the Australian and Mexican leaders can have no other outcome except damaging Trump’s conduct of foreign policy.
No wonder chief adviser Steve Bannon refers to the media as “the opposition party.”
And yet, so far, the White House has yet to find the right combination of personnel and message to combat them. Its first mistake was treating communications policy as a public-relations exercise, handled almost exclusively by the Reince Priebus/RNC faction in the White House. That didn’t work, which is why both Priebus and former press secretary Sean Spicer are now gone.
During his brief tenure as head of communications, Scaramucci had some good ideas (although conducting a profanity-laced, career-ending interview that he thought was off the record with the New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza was not one of them), including professionalizing the staff, halting the leaks, focusing on the president’s accomplishments and de-escalating tension with the media.
But it takes two to tango, and a hostile, compromised media is not about to abandon its overarching antiTrump “narrative,” no matter how many drinks communication staffers buy them. What Churchill said of the Germans is equally true of the press corps: They’re either at your feet or at your throat. In the Obama White House, they purred like kittens (“what has enchanted you the most” about the presidency, asked one sycophant); with Trump, they tweet their derision multiple times a day.
As the administration searches for a new comms chief, these are some things it should keep in mind:
Hire a journalist. Public-relations types seek to mollify; reporters enjoy confrontation. Get somebody who knows the players, isn’t afraid of them and knows how to handle them.
Insist that credentialed reporters be demonstrably unbiased and factually accurate. If they’re not, request that their editors replace them with somebody who is. Follow their Twitter feeds to see what they’re saying behind your back.
Never say anything to a journalist you aren’t prepared to hear on the air or see in print or on the Internet. In an age of ubiquitous recording devices, nothing is really off the record.
Freedom of the press is right there in the First Amendment — but nowhere in the Constitution does it say that the government has to be nice to the media, spoon-feed them information, accommodate their travel wishes, suffer silently their snark and sneers or permit them unfettered access to its private papers and conversations. Treat them professionally, and expect the same from them; that’s it.
Finally, take advantage of the power imbalance. The media needs the White House more than the White House needs the media.
That’s a lesson both sides need to relearn — fast.