President Trump didn’t win the 2016 election because he’s exceptionally cunning. He won because his opponent was the exact opposite.
The same will likely be said of his never-ending slap-fight with the news media. Trump is campaigning to undercut and delegitimize an already unpopular press corps. Based on the way newsrooms keep responding to his attacks, it’s not far-fetched to think the president will win this one, too.
“What if journalists could consistently and powerfully get their act together in meaningful collaboration, truly realizing their own strength in numbers?” Washington Post columnist Margaret Sullivan asked this week. “[I]f last week’s publication of editorials proved anything, maybe it’s that news organizations are capable of coming together. A small victory, perhaps, but something to build on.”
She is speaking of the more than 300 newsrooms that coordinated editorials last week in protest of the president’s anti-media attacks.
To put it bluntly: The press’ nationwide demonstration against the president was a bad and stupid idea.
Pushing back on the White House is great. A free and independent press is crucial to an open and transparent society. But if you’re going to counter-punch the president, don’t combine it with an exercise in self-defeating, self-important navel-gazing.
First, keep things in perspective. The president’s attacks rarely rise above him saying mean things. Journalists aren’t being arrested. The Trump administration hasn’t secretly collected the Associated Press’ phone records. It hasn’t invoked the Espionage Act against reporters. In fact, the Ali Watkins incident is the closest this administration has come to encroaching on press freedoms, and that issue seems more to be a matter of a journalist’s unethical behavior than anything else. Characterizing Trump’s attacks as existential threats to the First Amendment rings hollow, especially in light of the fact that these newsrooms didn’t launch a similar coordinated responses to obviously worse anti-media behavior from previous presidents.
Second, if you’re going to make a stand for press freedoms, be consistent. People can spot selective outrage.
You may recall the outcry after it was revealed in April that Sinclair staffers were asked by corporate to read a message promising viewers that the company’s news coverage is more reliable than the competitions’. Not at all scandalous, but you’d think otherwise based on the reactions expressed by many in media. In contrast, there was no outcry from reporters when it was revealed that editorial boards in the McClatchy chain had been “encouraged” to publish the same Trump editorial.
“It’s exceedingly rare for multiple McClatchy papers to speak with one editorial voice, but this was an important statement for us to make,” Kansas City Star editorial page editor Colleen McCain Nelson told Politico.
No one called this revelation “stunning.” No one called the McClatchy directive “extremely dangerous to our democracy.” No one called it “propaganda,” “Orwellian,” or a “slippery slope to how despots wrest power, silence dissent, and oppress the masses.”
Some corporate messages are better than others, apparently.
Third, let’s think about the optics of the editorial protest. Trump’s ongoing claim is that the news media is out to get him and, by extension, his followers. He speaks of “the media” as a single, monolithic entity. He claims it moves in unison to undermine him and his administration.
What better way to discredit the president’s assertion that the press is a partisan conglomerate that coordinates its attacks against him than for the press to, uh, coordinate mass editorials against him? This is called a “self-own.”
The surest way to combat Trump’s criticisms is simply to get stories right. There’s obviously a lot of work to be done on that front. Less time opining about the injustices suffered at the hands of a rude president and his supporters, and more time spent doing the hard work of investigating his administration.
Lastly, everyone should take a note from the Los Angeles Times, which declined to join the herd last week.
“[T]he editorial board decided not to write about the subject on this particular Thursday because we cherish our independence,” the Times explained. “We mean no disrespect to those who have decided to write on this important subject today. But we will continue to write about the issue on our own schedule.”
An independent newsroom being independent. What a concept.
