The news isn’t fake. But we need to report it better
On the last Saturday of April, Donald Trump, who doesn’t exactly like working on weekends, made a trip to Michigan for a rally. He touted what he saw as the many accomplishments of his administration. He railed against all of the injustices that he must endure. And of course he bashed the media.
“These are very dishonest people — many of them,” he said, and I must admit: The “many of them” qualifier surprised and gratified me. It was atypically generous of the president. “Fake news,” he muttered. “Very dishonest,” he groused. “The sources don’t exist.”
While he was painting this portrait of us as frivolous and sour, what image were we putting out? That night, at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, journalists swanned into a ballroom as thick with self-regard as any Academy Awards auditorium. They listened to the comedian Michelle Wolf do what she was hired to: savage Trump and his aides in vicious and occasionally vulgar terms that predictably caused the media’s enemies to trumpet that journalists are no more dignified than the president whose indecency they lament.
Then? Many of the journalists who attended the dinner and many who merely observed it from afar freaked out. In the toxic ecosystem of Twitter, they debated whether Wolf had shamed Sarah Huckabee Sanders for her appearance; whether reporters rising to Sanders’ defence were trying to make nice with a source; and on and on. There were think pieces, then more think pieces. This rococo deconstruction exemplified the very self-absorption that got us into this mess in the first place.
Tim Alberta, who writes for Politico, correctly noted that “every caricature thrust upon the national press — that we are culturally elitist, professionally incestuous, socioeconomically detached and ideologically biased — is confirmed by this train wreck of an event”. Kyle Pope, the editor of Columbia Journalism Review, observed that the event itself was “destined to be either sycophantic, on one extreme, or mean-spirited, on the other. Neither is a good look at a time when trust in media is tenuous.”
He’s right. We were held in low regard by many Americans before Mr Trump came down that escalator. And Mr Trump has been trying with all his might to yank that regard lower ever since.
We’re under sustained attack by a shameless president whose contempt for a free press is profound. And regardless of the merits of that attack, our response is pivotal to surviving it and preserving the public’s trust.
In many ways, that response — from excavations of links between Mr Trump and Russia to exposés of the workings of Facebook — has been excellent, a perfect illustration of why journalists are so vital.
But other aspects of our reaction trouble me. Because Mr Trump is so hyperbolic — and so dishonest — about our vices, we’re prone to focusing excessively and even exclusively on our virtues. We sing an immodest aria about them.
In the face of Mr Trump, The New York Times began its “The Truth Is” campaign: “The truth is hard,” “The truth is hidden,” and so on. The Washington Post put, on the top of its front page, the legend “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” Such approaches are part of what prompted media critic Jack Shafer to complain that when reporters are maligned, “They go all whiny and preachy.”
“I won’t dispute that journalists are crucial to a free society,” he wrote. But “the chords that aggrieved journalists strike make them sound as entitled as tenured professors”.
Pushed up against the ropes, we’re so busy self-justifying that we sometimes forget to self-examine. And there are aspects of how we work and come across that warrant adjustment.
We indulge too often in snark for snark’s sake, because it’s fun and gets attention.
I worry, for example, about a 2016 column about Mr Trump that I had an especially good time with. It posited
that his trademark tresses were a mood ring, their colour changing from lemon to orange to grapefruit. “He basically has a whole Whole Foods citrus section atop his head,” I said. My headline: “The Citrusy Mystery of Trump’s Hair.”
I was trying to cast his coiffure as a metaphor for his inconstancy and obsession with surfaces. But still. I played into a caricature of journalists as smart alecks taking cheap shots from the cheap seats. We have to watch our tone.
It’s impossible to talk about tone without talking about Twitter, so let’s. Are we right to spend so much time there? Twitter is a powerful tool, a handy delivery system for bulletins, fact checks, links. But too often, we use it as a vanity fair and an ego fortification system. Driven by the dopamine of “likes” and retweets, we jockey to be bitchiest or most blistering, snidest or most sarcastic. These gibes are then used against us. And the sniping nurtured on Twitter seeps into our interactions elsewhere.
As Damon Linker, a columnist for The Week, put it, “This makes Twitter horrible for our politics and equally bad for journalism.”
More and more of us are yoking ourselves to increasingly narrow ideological and oratorical identities. A particular perspective of ours draws notice. We get bookings — on television, for speeches — based on it. It becomes a brand with financial rewards. Press this button and get this argument. And as it grows more fixed, we appear less genuine.
We’re also served poorly by an occasionally reflexive pessimism bereft of adequate nuance. Don’t hear me wrong: If Mr Trump’s press is overwhelmingly negative, that’s because he has earned it. But we sometimes go too hard on lesser actors and episodes, potentially sacrificing the credibility and authority that we need for more galling moments.
One bit of recent press coverage raked Mick Mulvaney, a former congressman who is now the White House budget director, over the coals for saying: “We had a hierarchy in my office in Congress. If you’re a lobbyist who never gave us money, I didn’t talk to you. If you’re a lobbyist who gave us money, I might talk to you.”
But some of these accounts omitted or played down what he said next: “If you came from back home and sat in my lobby, I talked to you without exception, regardless of the financial contributions.” And few forthrightly acknowledged that this is common behavior among Democrats, too.
There’s plenty in the Trump administration to excoriate without any gratuitous huffing and puffing. Overreach and exaggeration are his stocks in trade; let’s not make them ours.
One of my overarching fears about the Mr Trump era is that he’ll drag the rest of the country, including the media, down to his level. There’s little he’d love more than to invalidate us, because then he could sell whatever alternative facts and ornate fantasies that he chose to. That’s a chilling prospect, and that’s why we can’t inadvertently abet his cause.
The news that we report is real. But so is the need to be even better at reporting it.