San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
John Diaz:
The exhausting week that was — and more to come
By the time West Coast journalists reached their offices Monday morning, there was no doubt this was going to be a huge news week. Reports were rocketing out of Washington that President Trump was about to fire Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, which would have significant implications for Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible collusion between the Russians and the 2016 Trump campaign. Or was Rosenstein about to resign, or had he already resigned? There were conflicting reports.
Other blockbusters were on the horizon. Two new allegations were emerging of sexual misconduct by Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh in advance of the much-anticipated testimony of Christine Blasey Ford. Trump was scheduled to address the United Nations.
These were not just stories the media were covering. These were stories in which journalists were part of the story — which is never a comfortable position for a profession dedicated to pursuit of the truth, and routinely disparaged by President Trump as “enemies of the American people.”
A look back at the week’s big events and the way they were covered:
By week’s end, the story line on Rosenstein’s fate was incomplete. Here is what is clear: The sequence of events was triggered by a New York Times report in which Rosenstein was said to have privately spoken with colleagues in May 2017 about wearing a wire to record conversations with Trump and recruiting Cabinet members to invoke the 25th Amendment to begin a process that could lead to an unfit president’s removal from office.
It was an explosive report, and one that seemed certain to infuriate a president who is both mercurial and insistent upon loyalty.
But could Trump really risk a constitutional crisis by ousting the official who oversaw an investigation that was scrutinizing, in part, his own campaign? The breathless coverage began with Axios reporting that Rosenstein had “verbally resigned” to White House Chief of Staff John Kelly. CNN quickly jumped in saying that a “senior official” had confirmed the news, other news outlets blasted their versions of resigned-or-fired, the talking heads on cable jumped into speculation on whether this was a designed distraction from the Kavanaugh mess, and the network cameras were trained on the White House driveway for a Rosenstein sighting.
The deputy attorney general came and went, still employed. White House press secretary Sarah Sanders sent out a statement that Rosenstein and Trump would meet when the president returned to Washington on Thursday. That meeting was postponed until this week so it would not “interfere” with the Kavanaugh hearing, the White House announced.
There are two clear takeaways from the episode. Viewers should greet a “Breaking News” chyron on cable TV with a caveat: Real-time reporting is subject to change. And that precaution should apply doubly to the panels of pundits who seem to dominate the airwaves these days and too often allow their certitude to outpace the available facts. In this case, there seems to be a real possibility that some of those sources who were feeding the Rosenstein story were trying to force Trump’s hand. Less clear is the motivation: Was it to steel his resolve or bait him into doing something politically reckless?
This was the week the president of the United States had the ignoble distinction of being laughed at in the United Nations. It came when Trump boasted that his administration had achieved more than “almost any administration” in U.S. history in its first two years.
Almost instantly, CNN and others began playing a montage of Trump, as candidate and president, suggesting variations of his phrase that America had become a “laughingstock to the entire world” under his predecessor. This time, they really were laughing.
That humiliating moment seemed to be the precursor for what was arguably one of the most bizarre presidential news conferences in the television era. So
erratic was his performance — from bragging about his brain as “very, very large” to ordering a female reporter to sit down to suggesting George Washington “may have had a bad past” — that conventional journalism could not fully capture the absurdity. Late-night comedians were on the case.
Trevor Noah: “The wildest incoherent ramblings of words put together.”
Jimmy Kimmel: “The wheels are off the wagon: It’s time to put Grandpa in an assisted-living facility, because he cannot care for himself.”
There were no light moments in Thursday’s riveting Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. Social media exploded with expressions of solidarity from women as Christine Blasey Ford so poignantly described how she was attacked by Brett Kavanaugh when they were in high school. It was excruciating to watch. Kavanaugh’s hyperemotional response was no easier. As he vented with rage and self-pity, interrupting senators and suggesting he was the victim of revenge by Democrats and “leftwing opposition groups” for the 2016 election, two words came to my mind. Judicial temperament.
The FBI may or may not come up with evidence this week that will change any minds about the sexual assault accusation, but are fair-minded Americans who witnessed Kavanaugh’s performance comfortable with him sitting on the highest court in the land?
And now for a positive word about treatment of a breaking news story. The Matier & Ross scoop that a crack was discovered in a structural steel beam at the newly opened $2 billion Transbay Transit Center sent our newsroom into overdrive mode, and Twitter was lighting up with speculation. Editor in Chief Audrey Cooper soon sent a tweet that showed how a serious news operation thinks under pressure. “Things we are working on,” she tweeted, citing five points, from traffic and transit impacts to inspection records to whether this was related to the Millennium Tower.
“Journalists report. We don’t speculate,” she tweeted, adding, “What else do you want to know?”