News media have spent the first years of Donald Trump’s presidency yelling at the Internet.
If Trump or one of his lieutenants tweets something false, stupid, or just plain confusing – or even just apparently so – it’s guaranteed reporters will rush to be the first to issue a scalding “burn. Likewise, if someone outside the White House says something positive about the administration, or if they say something that could reflect well on the administration, you’d better believe that a cadre of journalists will descend on that person with similar mockery.
To be fair, many journalists do simply fact-check the president, but many, many more satisfy themselves merely by tweeting what they and their colleagues agree are perfect “gotchas.” It doesn’t really matter what the president or his staff say. Whatever it is, there will be an avalanche of “resisting” responses from news media.
But this process is getting very lazy. For some in the press, speaking truth to power in the era of Trump is increasingly about trivial “well, actuallys” than focusing on the issues that matter. Because if there’s one thing that’ll surely put the president in his place and restore dignity and civility to the republic, it’s a group of online pedants slapping each other on the back for challenging the White House and others with the perfect nitpick.
Consider, for example, the Toronto Star’s Daniel Dale, who struggled Friday morning with positive economic news reported by the Trump administration.
This begins with CNN’s Jake Tapper, who tweeted: “Good economic news: The US economy added a strong 201,000 jobs in August. The unemployment rate stayed at a historically low 3.9%.”
Not on Dale’s watch!
“CNN journalists are calling the 3.9% unemployment rate ‘historically low.’ It is one of the lowest ever, but it’s not a record: the rate was 2.5% in 1953, and the rate was lower than 3.9% as recently as 2000,” the Toronto Star correspondent tweeted.
That’s a really great point, except for the fact that that’s what “historically low” means (Dale clarified later that he worried “historically low” could “be read to mean ‘record low,’” so he wanted to “provide context”). Scrambling to “well, actually” positive economic news by challenging the meaning of “historically low” is the pettiest attempt at a Trump-era fact-check since reporters coolly noted that, yes, Trump was born after the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor.
That episode began with the Washington Post, which reported on Aug. 28:
“I remember Pearl Harbor,” the president said, referring to the surprise attack that propelled the United States into World War II.
For some in news media, the real takeaway from this insane report is that 1941 and 1946 are, in fact, two different years.
“Pearl Harbor was December 1941 Trump was born in June 1946, I’m too lazy to do the math but it’s 4 years and change,” said the New York Times’ Kendra Pierre-Louis.
NBC News’ Dartunorro D. Clark tweeted, “Pearl Harbor: December 7, 1941 Trump’s date of birth: June 14, 1946.”
“One small note about this [Washington Post] in which Trump reportedly told the Japanese PM he ‘remembers’ Pearl Harbor: Trump was born in 1946. Pearl Harbor happened in 1941,” said MSNBC’s Kyle Griffin.
Good job being able to count, fellas. But can we go back to the part that was actually newsworthy? The problem here isn’t that the president was born after the Pearl Harbor attack. (Also, for crying out loud, the “I remember” construct is no crazier than “remember the Alamo” or the “never forget” tag that we apply to the Holocaust.) The problem with this Washington Post story is that Trump reportedly harangued the prime minister of an ally nation for no apparent good reason.
These 1941 “gotchas” miss the point nearly as hard as the NBC News fact-check that dinged Trump for claiming Hillary Clinton, “acid washed her email server.”
“Clinton’s team used an app called BleachBit; she did not use a corrosive chemical,” NBC said in a definitely helpful note.
The Pearl Harbor “burns” are almost as ridiculous as the time a certain Toronto Star correspondent challenged Trump for claiming Clinton, “destroyed her iPhones with a hammer.”
“The two destroyed phones were BlackBerries,” Daniel Dale noted in an article dated Sept. 25, 2016.
Way to focus on the issues that really matter, folks. Your move, Donald Trump!
