GENE THERAPY
Gene Collier says cable news needs to stop pandering to Trump’s rantings.
Whether they’re laying out the high school newspaper or anchoring the network news, journalists have no obligation to balance truth with untruth. That’s not balance. That’s stupidity. And now it’s deadly.
The cable news networks, most particularly, must stop pandering to Trumpian ratings out of fear that if they don’t broadcast his every available utterance, someone else will.
We have to do better than that.
Way back on Oct. 21, when I first started saving string for this column, (that’s pre-impeachment, post-perfect phone call that triggered the impeachment and very pre-coronavirus), I watched a CNN anchor apologize all over herself in the middle of the day for the perceived journalistic faux pas of not delivering fresh video of President Donald Trump in a timely manner.
“We’ll have it for you very shortly!” she said.
No hurry, I thought. The network then ran Mr. Trump’s comments in their entirety, a typically blusterful jactation of lies, inaccuracies and other nonsense pulled from between one set of cheeks and blown out the other.
Why do we feel like we have to do this? It’s destructive. The media must come to some consensus on the advisability of constantly putting Mr. Trump in front of every other thing.
Maybe the cable networks can rethink it now that the misinformation is quite literally killing people. At least one person is known dead and another in intensive care because Mr. Trump apparently had chloroquine in his pharmaceutical fantasy league.
Is Mr. Trump directly responsible? Probably not.
Are the networks any less culpable?
Probably not.
Very few are the newspapers in this country doing a better job of informing a substantial readership during this pandemic than the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, but I noticed that in Thursday’s edition, the word Trump did not appear in a single headline until page 6, and did not appear in the remainder of the A section at all.
That’s not the way I’d handle things necessarily, but it’s a good reminder that you can present exemplary journalism without this breathless swooning at the president’s every entrance.
Greg Jackson, writing in the January issue of Harper’s, explained it like this:
“There is no noncircular logic that ordains the newsworthiness of the president’s tweets. As the celebrity is famous for being famous, so Trump’s tweets are news because they get covered as news. If the news media chose only to report on concrete actions and orders emanating from the White House, the activity of governing would once again become the proper object of political contemplation.
“What news outlets appear to mean by insisting that they must cover Trump’s tweets ... only draw(s) attention to the central flaw in their industry. They are not, they reveal, reporting “the news” — an expert and principled curation of what they believe is important — but seeking to win audience share, like any other entertainment business, by trading on the inherent prestige and of misconceptions about what we have come to call news.”
This is precisely what Neil Postman was getting to in “Amusing Ourselves To Death,” which came out in the ‘80s, when cable news was still a fledgling operation.
“The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter,” wrote Postman, “but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining.”
Any fool, right up to and including the president of the United States, can get on a keyboard and stone the cable networks, but I’m not generally of that inclination. The Anita Hill hearings, the Florida recount and 9/11 attacks magnetized cable coverage that are hallmarks of journalistic excellence, of which the current crop of reporters, producers, anchors, editors and photographers are more than capable.
But with the number of deaths from a global pandemic still a tragic imponderable, maybe turning over the mic to an unimpeachable source of misinformation, vitriol, aggrievement and sophomoric incivility isn’t the best idea.
CNN, MSNBC and even Fox are said to be considering a course correction, but CNN did a spectacular backtrack on Wednesday when it cut away from the administration’s daily task force briefing the minute Mr. Trump left the podium, then had to jump back into comments from Dr. Anthony Fauci, who was dispensing factual and useful information.
On Thursday, CNN did it again. At least MSNBC and Fox stuck with the news conference. Still, it’s clear that for some reason, the cable networks feel they can sell more advertising around Mr. Trump saying, “It’s hard not to be happy with the job we’re doing.”
Try asking a New York intensive care unit nurse how hard it is.
Bulletin: There is no Recommended Daily Adult Requirement of the various frequencies with which Mr. Trump deals his thin rhetorical glossary of superlatives: “tremendous,” “incredible,” “fantastic,” “amazing,” “like nothing we’ve ever seen,” “great,” “big,” “biggest,” “terrific,” “thousands and thousands,” “millions and millions,” “billions and billions” and my favorite, “We’ve been treated very unfairly.”
He’s great for ratings, this president — which is why no one did more to get him into the White House than the cable networks. Now, to keep those ratings up, they’re helping him spread misinformation and outright lies during a national emergency.
Without knowing it, Mr. Trump warned us about this.
I believe the quote was, “and when you’re a star, they let you do it.”