Here’s the problem in a nutshell: President Trump thinks the media are out to destroy him. The media think they’re holding him accountable. Neither Trump nor the media can tell the difference between these two things. In his most recent column, Ross Douthat rightly worries that this dynamic is going to drag everybody down:
We’ve seen a number of offensive examples of media bias in the last week. As far as anyone can tell, the New York Times made up a hatchet job on Trump’s pick for Energy secretary, Rick Perry, and the media gleefully piled on even though the premise was transparently unbelievable and the sourcing next to nonexistent. The Washington Post mocked another Trump nominee for praying, and referred to another Trump nominee who’s a Yale computer science pioneer as “anti-intellectual” in headlines. (See a discussion of these examples and more here.)
At the same time, it appears that Trump marched out White House press secretary Sean Spicer on Saturday to tell a bunch of brazen untruths about the inauguration crowd size, and White House adviser Kellyanne Conway doubled down the next day by labeling the presentation of said untruths “alternative facts.” The media went into an uproar, this time understandably. However, a good portion of Trump supporters didn’t care and were just happy Trump was sticking it to the hated and unfair media.
Needless to say, this is a terrifying place to be. The consequences of fomenting so much distrust are enormous. Say there’s a threat from Iran, and the Trump administration and the media are pushing different stories about how imminent it is. Who do you trust? Here’s one answer:
Rely on independent experts. https://t.co/8sA7N6XiFx
— Jeffrey Lewis (@ArmsControlWonk) January 22, 2017
Except that’s not really an answer in a climate where everything has been politicized, and Arms Control Wonk’s Jeffrey Lewis is Exhibit A for how this is a problem. He was one of the “independent experts” and journalists who leveraged their credibility in this coordinated and sub rosa plan by the liberal interest group Ploughshares to push the Obama White House’s ill-advised nuclear deal with Iran:
Ploughshares and the list-serv played a key role in coordinating and pushing talking points to shape the media coverage of the Iran Deal, even if that meant obfuscating the problems of the deal. They even went so far as badger and sow doubt about the few media reports that raised questions about the deal.
So it’s awfully clear that deferring to experts is not a solution to media distrust. Instead, the media needs to rebuild its credibility to be a strong check on the government, something even Trump supporters should realize. That means holding themselves accountable for the genuinely worrisome aspects of how they enabled, rather than challenged, the Obama administration.
The Iran Deal was just one example where it’s fair to say the media, at a minimum, resigned themselves to pushing ideology and the White House agenda over public transparency. CBS News and 60 Minutes had video of Obama the day after Benghazi admitting it could have been a terrorist attack, and sat on it until right before the election while the White House brazenly pushed false narratives. On the domestic side, Obama explicitly promised Americans they could keep their health insurance under Obamacare dozens of times—yet Pulitzer Prize-winning media organizations repeatedly called Obama’s insurance claim “true.”
That servility has created a big danger now with Trump supporters: “whataboutism,” or the temptation to respond to legitimate critiques of Trump’s lies by saying, “but what about those times you let Obama get away with it!” It’s never okay to lie, and it’s never without serious consequences when the White House does it. The media were right to pounce on Trump and Spicer for lying about crowd sizes, and it’s a bad omen about what Trump and his administration might lie about in the future.
However, so long as the media remain defensive and fail to resist attacking Trump unfairly, I’m afraid that the whataboutism will remain a safe harbor for Trump supporters. The media need to explicitly make efforts to regain some credibility, and even a little humility acknowledging of past mistakes will go a long way. (So would working to fix our politically monochromatic newsrooms by making them culturally and ideologically diverse.)
The media bearing in mind their fallibility and incorporating it into their work is easier said than done. But it would make it a lot harder for the administration and those who accept its falsehoods to use the media as a foil. It would make any continued problems related to Trump’s dishonesty much clearer to the American people. And it is voters, not the media, who must ultimately hold Trump to account.
