The president’s supporters don’t care if he’s mean to journalists. So ignore his insults and focus on his lies
‘We are now four weeks into the Trump administration, and you may find
yourself just about on the point of divining how the president feels
about the media.’
Photograph: Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty
There’s a scene near the start of the movie Tootsie
where Dustin Hoffman is trying to persuade his agent – the peerless
Sydney Pollack – to cast him in his roommate’s play. The work, Return to
Love Canal, is about a couple who move back to the site of a
devastating environmental disaster. Pollack’s reply is the very essence
of short shrift. “Nobody wants to produce a play about a couple that
moved back to Love Canal! Nobody wants to pay 20 dollars to see people
living next to chemical waste! They can see that in New Jersey.”
Oof. Argue with that and stay fashionable. I keep being reminded of it every time another media outlet leads its Trump coverage with Donald Trump’s attacks on media outlets. Guys! Nobody cares how mean he was to journalists! Well, some people do – but not in the way you want. In the wrestling match they’re enjoying, the media is definitely the heel. Yet on the self-dramatisation goes, in a news market hardly short of alternative stories. I keep reading that Trump has “turned on the media”, to which the only reasonably response is: really? Which way was he facing before?
Before we continue, I should say that I am aware of the irony of using a column in the media to implore the media to stop focusing so much on the media. Still, if it falls to me to look like a silly billy, it’d hardly be the first time. In the humble service of home truths, I simply question the wisdom of headlines like: “Journalists, battered and groggy, find a renewed sense of mission” – an effort possibly crafted to put the experience of going down a rust-belt mine into some sort of perspective. Even so, I haven’t felt this naggingly uneasy since I read Tom Cruise’s attorney claim his movie shoots were akin to being deployed to Afghanistan.
We are now four weeks into the Trump administration, to say nothing of his earlier election campaign, and you may find yourself just about on the point of divining how the president feels about the media. Indeed, many averagely bright children of eight are across this one. There are uncontacted Amazon tribes among whom the putdown “fake news!” is already regarded as hackneyed.
Oof. Argue with that and stay fashionable. I keep being reminded of it every time another media outlet leads its Trump coverage with Donald Trump’s attacks on media outlets. Guys! Nobody cares how mean he was to journalists! Well, some people do – but not in the way you want. In the wrestling match they’re enjoying, the media is definitely the heel. Yet on the self-dramatisation goes, in a news market hardly short of alternative stories. I keep reading that Trump has “turned on the media”, to which the only reasonably response is: really? Which way was he facing before?
Before we continue, I should say that I am aware of the irony of using a column in the media to implore the media to stop focusing so much on the media. Still, if it falls to me to look like a silly billy, it’d hardly be the first time. In the humble service of home truths, I simply question the wisdom of headlines like: “Journalists, battered and groggy, find a renewed sense of mission” – an effort possibly crafted to put the experience of going down a rust-belt mine into some sort of perspective. Even so, I haven’t felt this naggingly uneasy since I read Tom Cruise’s attorney claim his movie shoots were akin to being deployed to Afghanistan.
We are now four weeks into the Trump administration, to say nothing of his earlier election campaign, and you may find yourself just about on the point of divining how the president feels about the media. Indeed, many averagely bright children of eight are across this one. There are uncontacted Amazon tribes among whom the putdown “fake news!” is already regarded as hackneyed.
On the most basic tactical level, getting everyone to talk about the media is a war of attrition in which Trump is the sole beneficiary. He aims to exhaust – and divert. What aren’t we talking about when we talk about the media? Take your pick: Russia, China, staggering conflicts of interest, corruption allegations, the security protocols in the terrace restaurant at Mar-a-Lago – just don’t call it “the Winter White House” – the two-state solution, the Republicans’ chilling decision (virtually buried after the press conference pyrotechnics) to bar members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus from a meeting with immigration and customs enforcement to discuss the raids and round-ups of undocumented immigrants. And more – so much more! In a staggeringly crowded field of things that are under attack, the media needs to downgrade itself – not least because doing so will make it stronger.
For my money, the most successful passage in Trump’s malarial press conference on Thursday came when NBC’s Peter Alexander pressed and pressed him on the detail of his lie that he won the biggest electoral margin since Ronald Reagan. The blow was landed. The lies are important; Trump’s endless media duck hunt is the distraction.
The Soviet-born writer Peter Pomerantsev finds the new White House’s tactics with the media eerily familiar, having watched them deployed by Putin’s Kremlin for years. Back in December, he had a stark message based on experience. “A lot of liberal America is inspired right now, and I can just see it falling into the same trap that the Russian liberals fell into. Russian liberals are in an echo chamber. They’re not reaching the people they’re supposed to reach. So the Kremlin gets to define them. Remember – your echo chamber is a trap. You need to be going out of your comfort zone to at least reach the people who are sitting on the fence.”
Journalists, he added, needed to “reinvent journalism so it doesn’t just involve us talking to ourselves”. Or, worse, about ourselves. It is often said that a spin doctor becoming the story is a wake-up call – journalists becoming the story is surely an even more cautionary one.
Of course, it’s tempting to get sucked in when the White House puts its top guys on the media beat. I see in the Washington Post that Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has been complaining about CNN coverage to its chief executive for the second time, with particular reference to two pundits. One of them, the majestic Ana Navarro, duly responded at the perfect length: “Really, Little Jared complaining about me cuz I get under President Daddy-in-Law’s skin? Oh, baby boy, I’m so sorry. Little boy Kushner, tough guy who’s supposed to achieve Middle East peace, is complaining about me to CNN. Boo-hoo!” Well quite. A few lines communicating her deep sense of personal shame and anguish about the criticism, and immediately back to the real issue: what are you doing about the Middle East peace process, Jared? Because we’d rather not be sidetracked by your eminently discountable TV criticism.
It would be nice to think that a version of this approach be adopted industry-wide. However self-deprecating and counterintuitive it may feel, media outlets could communicate just how little of a toss they give about Trump’s characterisation of them by mostly ignoring it. We know he applies the label “fake news” to everything he dislikes, everything he disagrees with, everything that gets to him, and everything that makes fun of him. So we don’t have to keep giving space to his every honk of the phrase.
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