San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
News media must be ready for master press manipulator
The news media are about to reach a pivotal moment when it will no longer be possible to ignore the Trump ’24 presidential candidacy. The media will then have to confront, once again, a problem that has baffled them ever since Donald J. Trump launched his first campaign in 2016 — how to cover this guy.
For the past year the Trump story has been dominated by his cascading legal trouble — the blistering damage awards for rape and defamation, the tax fraud rulings, the 91 criminal counts he faces — with updates on his hapless party rivals and his rages in and out of the courtroom.
But now the politics begins, big time. Republicans start voting in mid-January, and he will be officially and indisputably the party frontrunner. Trump the defendant will give way to Trump the candidate, and his rallies and media pronouncements will give him an altogether different presence in public consciousness than he has had since he left the White House.
He will be talking about policy, about immigration and inflation. He will address economic performance and trade, chaos in the streets, homelessness, Ukraine and Gaza, public education, racial reckoning, wokeness and cultural fissures. He will attack Joe Biden as a faltering and ineffectual chief executive and a moral blight. He will be more tightly scripted and, at times, he will sound sensible. And like any other major presidential candidate, he will be covered.
How, is a question with unusual dimensions.
Never in the half-century I’ve been paying attention have the media faced a major candidate who inspired the loathing Trump provokes. I haven’t seen polls that address this — and the media have little incentive to commission them — but I can say with confidence that Trump is widely despised by the working press. For the most part, aside from an ideologically committed sliver, journalists find him dishonest, corrupt, depraved, cruel and very likely sociopathic, and fear his re-election would be a historic calamity that could do lasting harm to core democratic institutions.
Now, it’s reasonable to ask whether if you believe that, can
you do your job as a journalist? After all, reporting normally entails some obligation to act with even-handedness, with fairness, to cover the rough-and-tumble of public life “without fear or favor,” as New York Times patriarch Adolph Ochs wrote in 1896. If you believe Trump is that dangerous, reporting on him with the bland neutrality routinely conferred on high-level newsmakers would be a civic betrayal.
So how should the media cover Trump? Is it possible, let alone desirable, for reporters to disregard their own beliefs that he will lead the country off a cliff?
Many cannot, and if they act responsibly they won’t conceal that from their readers. But what about journalists who want to be regarded as non-partisan, factual and trustworthy — as archaic as that sounds? Can they do that without omitting or soft-pedaling the many disturbing elements of Trump’s appeal?
The answer is unquestionably yes. Those disturbing elements are integral to the Trump story.
The real challenges Trump poses to news practices aren’t new at all, and demand a rededication to core editorial principles of accountability journalism: Instead of sluicing headline-hungry, selfserving posturings to the public and calling them news, reporting must be a deliberate and muscular mode of inquiry that guides the electoral conversation in directions that inform, contextualize and illuminate, and uses deftly the media’s greatest power — the power to highlight and to ignore.
What this means for Trump coverage:
First, a candidate’s agenda need not be the media’s. We don’t have to report what they want us to. This was the dogged insistence of the public journalism movement of the 1990s, when news organizations asked voters what they cared about and ignored juicy and sensational campaign claptrap that was unrelated to those concerns. Polls indicate voters, for example, care about the future of democracy and have lost confidence in the courts. Trump won’t
bring up his election theft claims, the anti-democratic reforms his aides say they are planning, or suggestions that he will pardon himself if necessary, so the media must. Make him address issues that matter. That’s the price of the attention he covets.
Second, it’s the media that decide on play. Outrageous assertions, name-calling, and bogus claims need not drown out substantive disputes, and the quaint notion that the accuser is harmed when the accusation is malicious doesn’t mean it deserves prominence. Analysts warn that this year’s voters seek toughness, so amplifying the cruelty of Trump’s latest bullying may only advance his cause. It may go viral, but that doesn’t attest to its news value. Virality is a measure of contagion, not importance.
Third, fact-checking must become a real-time operation, carried out, whenever possible, to accompany the statements in question. Publishing falsehoods and circling back to fix them later doesn’t undo the harm; the internet isn’t a self-cleaning oven, corrections don’t expunge error. Questionable assertions should not be reportable until they are confirmed. If they can’t be verified, it’s the falsity that’s the story.
Fourth, the coming campaign must be a battle between two incumbents. There is no challenger. Biden will run on his record, and Trump must not be allowed to run away from his, and what he says he will do must be held against the record of what he did when he had the chance. That means his successes will be acknowledged, but it also means he must be called out for criticizing elements of Biden’s performance that were better than his own.
Finally, one of the ironies of Trump as a media phenomenon is that volume matters more than substance, and his claims and nastiness have not only drawn big audiences but have net given him stature, even when roundly condemned. Over the past year, each time another devastating legal bomb went off, the rubble bounced and he emerged corpulent and red-faced, his standing as a defiant and resilient underdog strengthened.
He will now campaign at the same time he fends off legal disaster, and together those two big stories will naturally position him at the center of the daily news, denying Biden — competent but colorless, the perfect foil — the center stage that his candidacy, as sitting president, should at least contend for. If the media follow Trump with their customary ratings-driven ardor, however skeptical the coverage, he will soak up the media bandwidth and leave Biden an onlooker. The election results will ratify that dominance.
So the problems are real, but not insurmountable. The steps outlined here are meant to ensure that the media fulfill their civic duty of covering the coming campaign in ways that bring to light the matters that people say matter. They can shape the electoral conversation by grabbing back the strings the century’s most accomplished press manipulator has pulled to advance his improbable rise and recognizing what reporting in the public interest demands.