More than positivity
How well did the news media cover the meeting of President Donald Trump and North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un?
I think they did a good job. But Margaret Sullivan, media columnist for The Washington Post, was not impressed.
“The North Korea summit was a triumph of Trumpian stagecraft, and the media fell for it,” said a headline above her piece.
She described a news story in The New York Times this way: “Neutral enough, accurate enough, but was its underlying positivity really warranted?”
Yes, there was a lot of stagecraft. We will long remember seeing Trump and Kim shaking hands for 13 seconds.
And there was a lot of positivity in the early reports from Singapore. After all, this friendly tete-a-tete came only a few months after both leaders threatened each other with nuclear destruction.
After Trump and Kim signed a short, vague statement, the news coverage became more probing with less positivity.
Stephen Collinson wrote on cnn.com that the summit left lingering questions, such as: What about U.S. troops now in South Korea?
Susan Page in USA Today noted that the joint statement fails to include any reference to deadlines or verification for denuclearization.
CBS News interviewed a woman whose family starved to death in North Korea before she fled the impoverished country.
As for positivity, former NBA star Dennis Rodman broke down in tears when he spoke from Singapore with CNN’s Chris Cuomo.
“I’m so happy,” said Rodman, who has visited North Korea several times.
Immediately after the summit, Trump sat down for interviews with George Stephanopoulos of ABC News and Sean Hannity of Fox News, the president’s leading cheerleader in the media.
Stephanopoulos called Kim a brutal dictator and asked Trump, “How can you trust a killer like that?”
“George,” Trump responded, “I’m given what I’m given.”
Hannity showed video segments from other cable news channels in which Trump is treated with negativity.
Trump’s reaction was surprising. The news media “have been treating me very good on this subject,” he said.
But after returning to Washington, he tweeted that “the Fake News, especially NBC and CNN,” are “fighting hard to downplay the deal with North Korea.”
Following the interviews, Trump held a news conference at which he made news.
When asked why he called Kim “very talented,” Trump said that anybody is talented “who takes over a situation like he did at 26 years of age and is able to run it and run it tough.”
News reports reminded us that Kim is suspected of having two of his relatives killed and that his Communist regime has imprisoned an estimated 80,000 to 120,000 people.
To the surprise of South Korea and the Pentagon, Trump also told the reporters that the U.S. will stop conducting military exercises with South Korea.
North Korea’s state-run Korean Central News Agency described the meeting of Kim with Trump as “epoch-making.”
Now that’s positivity.