President Trump’s “Fake News Awards” presentation began not with a bang but a Healthcare.gov-style crash of the Republican National Committee’s website.
Anyone expecting a tuxedo-clad Trump to read cards bearing the names of the “failing New York Times” and “fake news CNN” or a flurry of new tweets for State Department staffers to print out was bound to be as disappointed as a cable news anchor snubbed by the president’s show.
But the end result more closely resembled conservative gripes with the mainstream media that date back to Spiro Agnew, presented in RNC “fact sheet” form, than Joseph Stalin — unless the Media Research Center’s regular “disHonors” award dinner constitutes a type of gulag.
Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., made a number of valid points in his speech criticizing Trump for engaging in this kind of media-bashing, especially when he pointed to more oppressive regimes that are luxuriating in the craze of calling unflattering headlines “fake news,” and the White House’s description of the retiring senator as a “mouthpiece of the Cuban government” over a perfectly legitimate policy difference was an unconscionably low blow.
Nevertheless, while Trump’s tweeting out of the RNC webpage taking predictable, and often well-deserved, shots at various media outlets might indeed be a “spectacle” beneath the dignity of the office, it also “beggars belief” to describe it as an “assault on the constitutionally-protected free press.”
To be singled out by Trump may invite a torrent of abuse from the president’s supporters, especially on Twitter. All other things being equal, it does not make any journalist on the receiving end of Trump’s tirades worse off career-wise. Most would eagerly wear the presidential opprobrium as a badge of honor.
Indeed, CNN’s Jim Acosta used that very phrase after an Oval Office confrontation with Trump. He was recently promoted to chief White House correspondent. MSNBC’s Katy Tur has seen her career take off after a series of contentious interviews with the future president on the campaign trail, including some uncomfortable — some feared dangerous — encounters with “Make America Great Again” rally-goers.
None of this justifies shabby treatment from the president or his supporters and it is perfectly legitimate for Trump-skeptical voices to ascend in the press, although Acosta frequently carries himself like a Ted Baxter-style parody of a pompous news anchor. Trump does not deserve an award himself for merely being rude while refraining from sending reporters to Guantanamo Bay.
But it ought to put Trump’s transparently political campaign against the media in perspective. It mainly takes the form of silly publicity stunts rather than fearsome attacks on the First Amendment. Threat inflation is rampant in Washington and here is no different.
It is precisely because Trump entertains, though so far does little to implement, unhealthy ideas about “opening up” libel laws to make it harder to criticize the famous and the powerful — and because he has escalated the rhetoric of Republican press criticisms far beyond isolated, hot-mic barbs against this or that “major-league asshole” at a top newspaper — that it is important to not conflate even over-the-top media-bashing with real interference.
Trump’s latest salvo against the media comes the day after reporters descended unto a briefing about the president’s health and as a group appeared overeager and ill-informed, unprepared to deal in basic medical terms but skeptical of an examination that did not comport with their armchair diagnoses.
Maybe that skepticism is warranted. Speculation about Hillary Clinton’s health, for example, was allowed some days. Other days it wasn’t. You’ll note these days weren’t very far apart.
There is, however, an eagerness to get Trump that is too often resulting in stories that are too good to check. It results in errors that overwhelmingly run in one direction.
After Trump told the Washington Examiner last year that he was willing to entertain proposals to break up the 9th Circuit after some unfavorable court rulings, one cable news network ran the chryon: “Trump threatens to break up 9th circuit (he can’t).”
Yet the full context involved legislation Congress could in fact pass, and Trump could actually sign it into law; it was not some unilateral, presidential court-smashing. Maybe it is not likely; maybe it is not wise. It is not constitutionally impossible or absurd.
Reporters are predominantly liberal. Even many of the conservative journalists working in New York and Washington opposed Trump, some all the way to Election Day. Many in the press feel they weren’t hard enough on Trump in 2016 or were too hard on Clinton, offering too much coverage to her emails or flaws as a candidate while ignoring her Republican opponent because he was considered a sure loser.
The good reporting on Trump’s scandals seemed to have little impact, with the significant exception of the “Access Hollywood” tape, which wound up being overtaken by email investigation-related events. On top of that, Trump routinely disparages journalists to the enthusiastic cheers of supporters who like how hard he hits back compared to previous Republicans — which really just eggs on the press.
All these tendencies have been magnified by the rapid news cycle, social media, and the political polarization of information sources into self-affirming echo chambers on all sides, in which all nuance is quickly stripped out of the discussion and errors seem to travel faster than corrections.
Trump himself accentuates all these problems. He is a serial exaggerator and fabulist. He conflates promptly corrected, if easily avoidable, mistakes with deliberately false information disseminated for propaganda, profit, or even fun — the original definition of “fake news” — while some of his own media boosters exercise minimal standards.
Perhaps this will erode norms in ways that come back to haunt press freedoms to a greater degree later. Or maybe such erosions will prove easier under a president who enjoys much chummier relations with the media.
In the war between Trump and the media, most of the casualties piling up on both sides are self-inflicted wounds.
