The 180: What the Media Could Learn from “Billions” (Season Two, Episode Two)
This week, I sat out the TV news for a few days on purpose. Why?
To keep my head from exploding, mostly.
I’m not joking. At some point, I realized that if I didn’t slow down and take a good long look at what I was hearing, seeing, thinking and feeling about the Trump administration, I was going to lose my shit.
Trump and his minions are some slippery suckers. Case in point, that performance before Congress the other night that I didn’t watch. That was some textbook, alt-right guerilla theater, baby.
I didn’t even have to watch it to know that. Because the snippet of an NPR show that slipped through my news “ban” the morning after indicated that the Republicans were ecstatic and the press was, again, playing into their hands by going gaga over the fact that Trump had seemed so “presidential.”
Jeez, guys, he just read the teleprompter really, really well. Is that all we’re going to ask of this guy? That he act like a grownup now and then?
I mean, it was kind of like that time we all freaked out when that tiger mauled one of the guys who’d kept him prancing around onstage like a little pet pussy cat for years. I wasn’t mad at the tiger. He was just being himself. Finally.
Actually, Trump’s act was the reverse of that. The tiger purred for a few minutes, and the press did, too. So all day long, when I did read or hear a headline — c’mon, they pop up everywhere while you’re online — it was, “Is this the New Trump?” or “Did that speech change your mind about Trump?”
Answer, “Hell, no.” To both questions. It was just one speech, people. But thanks for giving him even more stuff to brag about in those late night/early morning tweets. And BTW:
That’s not “fake” news. It’s lazy news.
And that’s why my head was exploding, even before that speech.
Somehow, the press keeps taking the bait. It astounds me. Of course, just calling him out won’t work, either. While it has to be done, it feeds the trolls and die hard Trumpsters.
In fact, almost everything the media writes that isn’t complimentary does that. Because he panders to his fan club so effectively and effusively that they take it personally when he’s attacked, or even questioned incisively.
You remember this from middle school, right? That burning need to BELONG? As an assistant principal I spent most of my day listening to tweeners explain that they beat the crap out of somebody because they were talking crap about about someone in their “crew.” And nothing I could say could convince them that they’d done something wrong.
In Trumpland, they call it “bullying” when a reporter does what a good reporter is supposed to do and they close ranks around their Leader like my middle schoolers. I bet even Edward R. Murrow couldn’t get past Trump’s fan base if we could beam him down from Heaven somehow. They don’t trust anybody.
Well, nobody in the main — er, lamestream media, that is.
So what’s a reporter to do in these dark, days when the president and his fans think Alex Jones is a reputable news source?
Saw a possible strategy on Billions the other night. I’m not going to recap the entire plot, but at the very end, psychiatrist Wendy Rhoades advised her beleaguered husband Chuck to try a trick she offered to her most problematic patients.
She called it “The 180,” and it’s a deceptively simple move, actually. Basically, it goes something like this:
When what you’ve been doing stops working, try doing the opposite of what you’ve been doing.
What would that look like for reporters covering Trump? I’m not even sure. The possibilities are literally endless. Maybe instead of reacting to him, they could just dive right into the ramifications of whatever he was trying to sell or smokescreen? No righteous indignation, no consternation, just, “Okay, let’s examine this calmly and closely, shall we?”
I know, I know. They don’t like facts. But there are people who do. And there are probably at least 3 million more of them than there are Trump supporters — popular vote, remember that? And one way to attract, retain, inform and inspire those readers, without validating the ire of the Trumpsters, might be to serve up those facts without the sturm und drang.
Remember, it’s not the media’s fault that the Resistance doesn’t have its own “energizer.” Or that the Democrats voted to toe the old party line a few days ago when choosing their DNC chairman, thereby proving that they’re still as clueless and — feckless — as ever.
I wonder if Steven Colbert could be convinced…yeah, probably not. But you have to admit, the end of this clip was pretty bad ass:
So while we Lefties are looking for a charismatic crusader, maybe the media could skip repeating Trump’s tweets and see them only as a “signal” that something ‘way more important than whatever brain fart he’s just had — or pretended to have — is going on behind the scenes. And get the skinny on that day after day, building a different kind of wall, fact by fact. A wall of facts so tall and strong that Trump’s lies can’t get over, under, around or through it.
I really can’t anticipate all the paths they could take. The approach would change story to story. But I do know just keeping that “about face” in mind might slow them down and force them to really THINK about what they’re writing.
I do this sometimes in fiction writing, forcing a favorite character to do something completely out of left field, something the reader would never expect them to do. But it’s more for me than my readers, truth be told. It wakes me out of my comfort zone and makes me work a little harder.
And it might scare the smug out of the Trump folks, too, to get totally unexpected reactions to all the mishegas they deliberately dump on us day after day. They always seem to be light years ahead of us somehow, because they can predict what we’ll do so accurately, based on what we’ve always done before.
So c’mon, let’s all of us do a “180.” Throw them off course for a while.
Vroom, vroom…
