Trump and the News Media Are Not at War
David Fahrenthold of the Washington Post says his job is to hold the president accountable.
Questioning Donald Trump can land you on the receiving end of a personal insult, as David Fahrenthold quickly discovered. But being called a “really nasty guy” by the soon-to-be most powerful man in the world did not faze Fahrenthold, and he certainly did not back down from his investigation of the Donald J. Trump Foundation, the former presidential candidate’s charitable organization.
Fahrenthold, a reporter for the Washington Post, embarked on a quest to trace the $6 million Trump had promised to donate to charity over the course of his campaign, including $1 million out of his own pocket, at an event in February 2016. It soon morphed into an eight-month investigation into Trump’s charitable giving involving the entire Twitterverse, which he documented in a first-person article.
“Not a lot of people were writing about this particular aspect of his character, which in the past had been a very important way that he sort of would reassure people that he was a good person,” Fahrenthold said. “It was an important part of the character he was building for himself.”
Trump set up his private foundation in 1987 as an outlet to donate his own money, and has pledged to donate more than $12 million to charity over the years. Fahrenthold found that Trump had donated only $5.5 million to his foundation since its inception. Fahrenthold set out to locate the rest of the money, an idea introduced by executive editor Marty Baron.
Fahrenthold contacted more than 300 charities Trump could possibly have donated to. He then posted his findings, scrawled on a legal pad, on Twitter, along with a call to help. He effectively used the old school reporting method of working the phones while making remarkable use of social media.
Twitter allowed Fahrenthold to enlist the help of as many people as possible. He also wanted Trump to know that he was looking, often tagging him in his tweets. Fahrenthold insisted that he was not out to get Trump, but rather was trying to prove him right. “I thought it would be a way to sort of advertise my search both to Trump and also to people who might be the recipient of Trump’s money,” he said.
His follower count jumped from 4,700 to more than 60,000, and people he had never met were contacting him to offer clues. An anonymous source reached out to alert Fahrenthold about a portrait of Trump he had bought with his foundation’s money. It now hung in his Doral resort’s sports bar. “I was just amazed by how much context other people can offer,” Fahrenthold said, “I sort of stumbled upon that.”
But he cautioned against viewing social media as more important than it really is, saying some political journalists treat Twitter as a world in itself rather than part of a world. “You need to be using Twitter as a way to gather information and to broadcast to a much broader audience,” he said. “To me, the idea is not to take too much time on it and not to let it use you.”
Fahrenthold never expected his reporting on the Trump Foundation to change the outcome of the election because “it’s not something that just grabs you by the lapel.” Then, in October 2016, Fahrenthold was sent a 2005 “Access Hollywood” video that featured Trump boasting about grabbing women without their consent.
“I didn’t think that it was going to be a turning point because Trump had already survived through so many things that other politicians could never survive,” Fahrenthold said, “I underestimated, at the time, how important it would be.” Despite the backlash, it was not enough to keep Trump out of the White House.
Fahrenthold, who is from Houston, Texas, emerged as star reporter during the 2016 election season, but he did not always aspire to be a political journalist. As a history major at Harvard University, he initially planned on becoming a lawyer. After trying his hand at journalism for the Harvard Crimson, he was hooked. He interned at the Seattle Times and New Orleans’ Times-Picayune before landing his first full-time job at the Post.
He will continue to cover Trump’s business empire and conflicts of interest under the new administration. He said the pace of the news in just the first three weeks was exhausting, a general feeling shared by many journalists covering Washington.
President Trump has described his relationship with the media as “a running war,” accusing journalists of being “among the most dishonest human beings on Earth.” Steve Bannon, his chief strategist, has declared the media “the opposition party” and advised them “to keep their mouth shut.” Members of the new administration, including Trump, have frequently lied about verifiable facts.
Fahrenthold offered some tips on being a journalist in Trump’s America. “The first thing is not to buy into the idea that we’re at war with him,” he said. “The second thing is to be as thorough and as fastidious in our fact-checking and our reporting as we ever have been.”
Although more biased news outlets are emerging on both sides of the political aisle, he believes traditional news media are still in demand. He acknowledged outlets like the Washington Post may not reach the diehard Trump supporters inclined to believe “alternative facts,” but converting them is not part of his job.
He noted that journalists should have a different approach to covering Trump the president versus Trump the candidate. While the press covered his incessant tweeting extensively during the campaign, Trump now has the power to turn mere words into action.
“You don’t have to depend on just what he says. You can write about the impact of his actions,” Fahrenthold said, adding that Trump’s tweeting often amounts to nothing more than “just yelling at the television.”
