The American press should be grateful to Trump

One of the delights of living in Canada is that we have the best seats to the drama of our friends to the south. Considered merely as spectacle, American politics is now perhaps the most diverting in all the world. America’s president is the greatest showman since P.T. Barnum, and his talent is a little like Falstaff ’s, the latter having observed that he “was not only witty in (himself ), but the cause of wit in other men.” With Mr. Trump we may say, to take merely a neutral descriptive, he is not only interesting in himself, but is the cause of some extremely dull people being interesting, too.

I cannot imagine another incumbency that would exert a magnetism on behalf of CNN’s Jim Acosta for example, yet under Mr. Trump’s baton the rude and frequently obnoxious Acosta, whining perpetually at presidential press conferences, has built himself something of a profile, albeit a demeaning and trivial one. Extending this notion, one of Mr. Trump’s many claims is that a goodly portion of the American press, however much it exerts itself in contempt and hostility towards his person, actually owes him a great deal. From The New York Times, to the desperately woeful Huffington Post — the journalistic wormhole to infinities of mediocrity — the American press owes what audience it may claim, more to Trump, and their bitter, bent, interminable coverage of him, than to any other factor.

Mainstream media is dependent on Trump, but for the raucous cable channels, he is their very lifeline. They could not function or exist without Trump as their obsessive, singular, manic focus.

There might be some virtue, however petty, in their stalkerlike attentions, if all the panels and specials and “breaking news” marathons offered some glimpse or glimmer of insight, freshness of observation, coherence of interpretation or solid analysis. But all is channelled through an outraged filter of shallow contempt and a haze of intellectual and moral condescension toward their target, the American president.

Where the anchors of CNN and CNBC, their lemming panellists and their house partisan “experts” got the sense that they are superior of the person they are covering, where they discovered that they are the anointed arbiters to deliver minute-by-minute judgment on Trump’s fitness for office, his intellect and his executive skills, is a riddle never to be unravelled.

This struck me with the greatest force this week after President Trump revealed he was asking the networks and cable for eight minutes of broadcast time to speak to Americans on the decades-long border crisis.

Now he wasn’t, like the freshly interred Fidel Castro was wont to do, commandeering the public airwaves for some 10-hour marathon eructation. Considering it has only been weeks since an invasion of thousands of migrants was threatening the territorial sovereignty of the United States, and considering there is talk now of other “caravans,” surely a president could legitimately ask for a mere eight minutes of air time to speak to his own citizens on this topic — a subject that has also occasioned a government shutdown.

The main networks’ initial response was to ponder in public whether they’d give him the eight minutes at all. Not being completely unhinged, they eventually saw that they would have to. But it was the voices of the cable world, one of which stood out in its obstinacy and sheer thickness from all the others — that of CNN’s Don Lemon — that were astonishing in their pontifications.

Anchor Lemon gave himself over to a discussion as to whether Trump’s talk should be put on delay and whether if could be “factchecked” prior to or during delivery, suggesting that if CNN did not indulge in some pre-delivery censorious scrutiny it would be facilitating “propaganda.”

“Do you think there should be — I don’t know, a delay of some sort? And then you can — because people believe, the president will say what he has to say, people will believe it whether the facts are true or not,” Lemon said Monday. ““And then, by the times the rebuttals come on, we’ve (CNN) already promoted propaganda …”

At CNN, irony is dead and the dust blows over its bones.

Lemon and his cable-mate panellists and fellow anchors actually see themselves as democracy’s monitors, overseers and judges over how and what news the American public should receive from their president — a development even the wise and prescient Thomas Jefferson did not envisage. There are now FOUR branches of the American government: executive, legislative, judiciary and, overseeing them all, the Assembly of Cable News Anchors and (if there’s a difference) LateNite Comics.

Personally, I think Mr. Lemon would out of his depth judging a pie contest in a one-baker town fair. Much of the media have in this age of Trump forgotten their function, what they are. They are no longer, as their Latin name signifies, in the neutralist middle; rather, they appear committed, in something like a half-frenzy, to imposing their unexamined reading of the world on a public more and more reluctant to give them heed. It does make for interesting times, but the drama is purchased at a very sad price.

FORTHE RAUCOUS CABLE CHANNELS, (TRUMP) IS THEIR VERY LIFELINE.

Jim Acosta