President Trump’s attacks on the media are sad and unbecoming of his office, but the media would do better not to overreact to them.
I raise this concern in the context of President Trump’s response Wednesday to an NBC News report that he asked for a tenfold increase in U.S. nuclear weapons. First, Trump tweeted the following:
With all of the Fake News coming out of NBC and the Networks, at what point is it appropriate to challenge their License? Bad for country!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 11, 2017
The president later added, “It’s frankly disgusting that the press is able to write whatever they want to write, and people should look into it.”
As I said, these words belie the president’s ignorance of history and of American exceptionalism. Still, the media is silly to overreact to them.
Most obviously, vis-a-vis NBC’s reporting and all the other reports President Trump has ever complained about, Trump has no means of implementing his will. Indeed, Trump has as much ability to suspend NBC’s broadcast license or launch a successful libel suit, as he has ability to transform into a cockroach and fly off into space.
This is as it should be, of course; facilitating scrutiny of power and freedom of speech, our democracy is the world’s most exceptional. Moreover, thanks to our co-equal branches of government and balancing of powers, we can be confident that American exceptionalism shall not perish from the earth. Trump may or may not know this, but frankly it’s irrelevant.
What is relevant is that journalists understand what Trump gets by attacking the media. Namely, he gets to vent, distract from any of his own failings, and mobilize his base. While many in the media claim they understand this, their overreaction to the president’s words today suggests otherwise. Take CNN’s Chris Cillizza, who claimed that he understands Trump’s base-mobilization strategy, but then portrayed Trump’s words as an imminent threat to civil society.
Give me a break.
Ultimately, by jumping into the coliseum of Trump’s fake-news-fake-war, the media only feeds the baying crowd of Trump’s most fervent supporters. The better solution is for the media to remain in the stands, reporting and analyzing the president on his successes and failures and ignoring his siren song.
