Un-fake news
A funny thing happened at the Donald Trump medical media event on the weekend, and while in the great scheme of things it probably won’t change very much, it’s well worth taking note of.
On Saturday, a team of medical staff came out of the Walter Reed medical centre to update the media on U.S. President Donald Trump’s condition, following his hospitalization due to COVID-19.
They painted a mostly positive but confusing picture of the president’s condition, giving timelines about when his infection with the virus had been discovered — which later had to be publicly corrected — refusing to talk about whether the president had been on oxygen, and describing treatments he’d been given that are normally offered to patients in far more serious condition than the way they were describing Trump’s situation. (The next day, White House physician Dr. Sean P. Conley admitted the press statement had been deliberately upbeat.)
The cheery analysis didn’t suit everyone. Even as the news conference was drawing to a close, a senior Trump administration official, on condition of anonymity, was telling reporters that the situation was more severe than the doctors were admitting, saying, “The president’s vitals over the last 24 hours were very concerning, and the next 48 hours will be critical in terms of his care. … We’re still not on a clear path to a full recovery.”
The anonymous source? Well, it was a pretty good one: Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff.
Meadows, unfortunately, had already outed himself as the source of the information, caught saying to reporters on a live camera feed from the event that he wanted to go off the record and speak as a source close to the administration.
A first point? The original news reports on Meadows’ comments actually honoured his request, until it became abundantly clear that the cat was out of the bag.
The second? That, when he started talking to the media, Meadows was absolutely comfortable with the idea that, by saying he wanted to speak without being identified, the media would honour the request. And they’d do it even though having the president’s own chief of staff dispute the rosy picture being put forward by medical staff — rather than an anonymous administration source — would be a far larger story.
Ostensibly, in the Trump era, many of the media are labelled “fake news,” and often, when reporters cite anonymous sources, the immediate response is that such sources can’t be trusted.
Interesting, then, that the president’s chief of staff would so clearly trust the media, and be so willing to be just that sort of source.
Politicians and their agents often have different goals, different rules and different reasons for what they say and do.
And journalists, caught in a tangle of other people’s interests, really are trying to get the whole story, even when our own rules sometimes tie our hands.