Media stumped over how to cover Trump
Presidents’ tweets, insults successful at throwing it off-kilter
How do we cover Donald Trump? That’s the confounding, or, in some cases, head-exploding question being asked in every news organization.
Certainly, the media, even the liberal-biased media, has with professional equanimity covered right-wing administrations before. The vast economic transformation of the Reagan years were taken in relative media stride. If anything, the media went easy on George W. Bush during the Iraq War.
No, it isn’t just politics that’s got the media in existential despair over Donald Trump. It’s attitude, it’s behavior, it’s language, it’s the rules of decorum, or the full-scale abandonment of those rules, that has left the media not only uncertain about its role, but quite thinking its role must be to defend propriety and resist what- ever unfamiliar, louche, rude, and right-wing thing is to come.
Last week, John Lewis, an important figure in the Civil Rights movement, and, since 1987, a congressman representing Georgia’s 5th district, declared, in certainly fighting words, that Donald Trump’s presidency was illegitimate. The issue of “legitimacy” has become a byword for the Trump resistance, something of an unfamiliar charge in the U.S.’s well-trod and remarkably orderly electoral system. (Democrats expressed outrage during the campaign at the suggestion that Trump might question the legitimacy of the expected Hillary Clinton landslide.) Still, Lewis, however hyperbolically, has the right to make that charge, and, he announced, to snub the Trump inauguration. (He snubbed George W. Bush’s inauguration, too).
Presidents are accused of many things and tend to respond judiciously. Trump, who likes to de- scribe himself as a counter-puncher, tends, however, to respond in kind. This is partly because Twitter makes it easy to do, and offers a way around advisers and cooler heads who might urge otherwise. And this is, in part, because, so far it’s been an effective tactic for him. Almost everybody everywhere thought his attack on the gold-star father, Khizr Khan, who, at the Democratic convention, attacked him, was lose-lose. Instead, it presaged Trump’s historic win.
How does the media deal with a president who lets no insult pass without returning one of his own? David Remnick, the editor of
The New Yorker, for instance, responded apoplectically to Trump’s apoplectic tweet to Lewis’ apoplectic charge. In this, if the president is breaking character, so is The New Yorker. The New Yorker, in its almost STORY CONTINUES ON 2B