TRUMP THE MEDIA BASHER TURNS TO MEDIA FOR HELP
Donald Trump loves to batter the media, the corrupt media, the pathetic media that’s forever distorting what he’s saying and underreporting the size of his tremendous crowds. But while the Republican presidential candidate often seems to lump together the actually quite diverse media as a miserable monolith, he clearly makes some distinctions. So when he needed to reboot his faltering campaign this week, he turned to a media figure for the big job. Meet Stephen K. Bannon, Team Trump’s newly minted CEO. But not just any media figure. Bannon has been executive chairman of Breitbart News, as enthusiastic and consistent a booster of The Donald as can be found. A local Breitbart is probably what Trump’s running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, was looking for when he briefly tried to set up a state-run news service that was quickly dubbed “Pravda on the prairie.” What’s more, there is word Trump will be trained for his crucial debate confrontations with Democratic rival Hillary Clinton by none other than Roger Ailes, the all-powerful CEO of Fox News until he was brought down last month by a sexual harassment lawsuit. You can’t get much more media than that. When I read about the new Trump-Ailes alliance, I thought for a moment I must be reading The Onion. In what cosmos could a candidate by far trailing with women in the polls think it was a good idea to bring on a man who has been the target of a wide array of sexual harassment allegations? But it turned out it I was reading The New York Times, which said it had been told about Ailes’ new gig by “four people briefed on the move,” none of them named in the Times story. Trump says Ailes has “no role” and suggests he doesn’t need any help preparing for the debates. While Fox News long has served as a Full Employment Act for failed GOP presidential hopefuls, I wouldn’t expect a huge influx of media people joining the Trump campaign. Particularly unlikely to come on board are conservative columnists such as David Brooks, George Will and Michael Gerson, who have been fulminating against Trump for months. It’s no wonder the TrumpAiles story brought to mind The Onion, because this whole campaign has had an Onionlike feel to it. A blustery billionaire with no political credentials running the table in the GOP primary? Never happen, right? Walls on the border, Muslim bans, blood coming out of wherever, a candidate feuding with Gold Star parents, calls for help from the Russians (the Russians!), Second Amendment people to the rescue, President Obama inventing ISIS? Then there’s the campaign chairman who, handwritten ledgers indicate, was to receive $12.7 million in cash from a pro-Russian Ukrainian political party. You really can’t make this stuff up. And it’s not even Labor Day. And while candidate Trump truly is in a class by himself, it could only be in a parallel universe where someone thought it was a good idea for a secretary of State to exclusively use a private email server, not to mention evade and obfuscate when that fact came to light. Hillary Clinton, blindsided by the Obama juggernaut in 2008, has been an exceedingly lucky candidate this time around. With her high negatives and lack of excitement and vision, it’s hard to imagine her with a clear lead at this point against a candidate who didn’t specialize in self-inflicted woulds and unforced errors. Trump’s steady stream of outrages have totally overshadowed the Clinton email albatross, and not because of that crooked media. Often when there is a damaging email development, Trump emerges with another I-didn’t-really-say-that outburst that sucks up all the oxygen. In the extraordinary weeks of Trump self-immolation since the conventions, Clinton has been content to play rope-a-dope, largely staying out of the limelight. If you like your elections heavy on policy debates, there’s no doubt this one has been a disappointment for you. Trump, as is his wont, has made it about Trump. And all that wishful thinking by the GOP about a Trump — you should excuse the expression — “pivot” to a more traditional campaign stance has been just that. Every old-school teleprompter speech is followed by fireworks. And the new Trump leaders — Bannon and campaign manager Kellyanne Conway — are big devotees of let Trump be Trump, of all guns blazing. Not that the now back-burnered campaign chairman Paul Manafort, he of the Ukrainian millions, has had much success keeping him on the straight and narrow. But there is one development that is really encouraging for those who care about the public debate. For too long, the press was content to stick to the comfort of he-said, she said — candidate X said this, candidate Y responded, and that’s that. In recent years, thanks largely to FactCheck.org, PolitiFact and The Washington Post Fact Checker, we’ve seen a dramatic rise of political fact-checking, of going the extra mile and sorting out who is telling the truth and who isn’t. This time around, as Duke professor and former PolitiFact head honcho Bill Adair points out, we’re seeing much more factchecking in real-time political reporting. Adair points to a number of examples of news outlets calling out Trump for the preposterous, I mean “sarcastic,” claim that Obama and Clinton founded ISIS. That’s a vital, if long overdue, step in the right direction.