Trump-era fictions catch journalism unprepared
Journalism has always assumed that what a president says is news. That outdated attitude is not helping journalists handle misleading labels, presidential lies or other intentional acts of harmful fiction.
The New York Times and others are now rightly focusing on the ways the Trump era is straining the conventions of journalism as well as politics. But the news business’s focus is far too narrow.
Up to now, the debate has centered on what to call Trump’s most extreme and hate-filled supporters and what to do about so-called “fake news,” which turns out to include a lot of real Russian propaganda. But there are bigger problems, including how to deal with blatantly untrue statements and erratic behavior from the next U.S. president.
American journalism has always had a built-in, knee-jerk deference for power in general and presidential power in particular. Editors and reporters tend to spend too much time seeking official sources and following official staged events. The news business confers a veneer of unearned credibility on officialdom’s press conferences and press releases, while demanding a great deal more evidence and confirmation before quoting unofficial or anti-official sources. Journalism’s conventional deference to institutional utterances and viewpoints is now making it very difficult to accurately report on America’s 45th president.
Journalism will have to adapt quickly to a world where the next president of the United States has an agenda better served by fictions than facts.
It seems pretty clear that the airy, Orwellian term “alt-right,” which was cooked up by Trump’s most far-right supporters to obscure something more precise, like “authoritarian extremists indulging in hate speech to advocate white supremacy.” While the racists and neo-Nazis of the “alt-right” have every right to refer to itself by any terms they can conjure, it seems equally clear that journalists should not be in the business of uncritically repeating the doublespeak labels invented by extremist groups to make themselves and their hideous ideas appear more widely acceptable.
Similarly, journalism is struggling with how to report things Trump asserts, especially on Twitter, that have no basis in reality. CBS News exemplified the problem on Nov. 27 when it initially reported on Twitter, with no qualifying language, Trump’s baseless claim that “millions” voted illegally for Hillary Clinton in states that she won. The ensuing reaction on social media forced CBS to issue a tweeted “CLARIFICATION” that included the words “Trump, citing no evidence, claims….” (You can see it all here or in the screen grab to the left.)
CBS’s mistake was that it treated Trump’s statement the way journalism has historically treated all statements by presidents and presidents-elect. The traditional assumption has been that anything a president says is news and is deserving of serious consideration. But in the new world of Trump, the news is often not what Trump says but the fact that he has absolutely no basis in reality for having said it. What journalists need to report, in essence, is that the next president deserves absolutely no credibility and no consideration for what he just said.
The battle to have journalists accurately label Trumps lies as “lies” was waged and at least partially won during the 2016 campaign, as more and more news outlets began labelling Trumps lies “lies.” Now that same battle is being fought all over again as Trump begins to govern.
While campaigning, Trump fought back against being called a liar by denouncing journalism as lies. It worked, energizing his crowds to insult and threaten the press pool. Now, the left is fighting back against Trump with Trump’s own anti-news strategy. One sign of that pushback emerged this week when a small left-wing PAC, The Progressive Turnout Project, published a fundraising email that focused on Trump’s tweeted lies about illegal voting for Hillary and then asked supporters to sign an “open letter” to Trump that included this: “Mr. Trump, America has grown accustomed to your lies. And while the media may have stopped holding you accountable — I have not.”
“Journalistic conventions of newsworthiness and objectivity also helped McCarthy.”
Friend and journalist David Beard recently posted a reference on social media to the notorious lies and demagoguery of Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s. It was a time when U.S. journalism was similarly tested by official fiction. The post quoted from the book “The Postwar Decline of American Newspapers, 1945–1965” by David R. Davies. In part, Davies wrote: “Journalistic conventions of newsworthiness and objectivity also helped McCarthy. His statements were automatically considered news because of his status as a U.S. senator, and convention required journalists to report them objectively no matter how preposterous his charges might seem to them.”
Like it or not, journalists now are again under increasing pressure to abandon the old, standing assumption that official statements—especially presidential ones—deserve some level of credibility. Leaving that assumption behind will be tough. Occupying a place where journalists must define reality and set boundaries around the possible is not easy. But that’s the new job in a world where the next leader of the U.S. either can’t or doesn’t care to distinguish between fact and fiction.
For more on why Trump creates all these fictions, I’d recommend this from Think Progress.
