The Role of the Media in the Trump Era
Being a journalist and reporting on political matters is not easy these days. It certainly has gotten a lot harder in the past few months. There is one person who is making their job particularly hard: Donald Trump. How is the media supposed to deal with Trump? Should they change their approach of reporting on him?
Let us take a look at some of Trump’s numerous comments about the media as president-elect:
Some were probably thinking that this might change when Trump actually is president. After all, you would think that the President of the United States has to focus on more pressing issues. Well…
The problem is that in Trump’s case we are not dealing with reasonable, substantiated criticism of the media. When somebody says something positive about him, he calls them great, if they criticize him, he calls them fake. The whole thing is so predictable, however, there still are millions of people who are actually falling for this, believing every word he says.
This poses a serious problem for the media: They can either say something Trump likes to hear, or they immediately get attacked on Twitter. If they are lucky. He has already refused to let a reporter ask a question during his first press conference as president-elect; his first press conference that, by the way, took place two months after his election. And that happened before his inauguration and the emergence of alternative “facts”. Trump’s philosophy is simple: Say something positive about me, or I will discredit and insult you. Let us hope we will not get to: Say something positive about me or nothing at all. First signs of this are already showing. Oh, and then today this happened:
This is a dangerous development. It sometimes seems like people in the United States, exactly as in Germany, are taking freedom of press for granted. It is not. The developments in Turkey are testament of this. The media cannot — under no circumstances — adapt to Trump’s behavior. They cannot let themselves be influenced by this. If they do, Trump will get exactly what he wants. And we all have to be careful. I have noticed that, when he tweets something particularly ridiculous, sometimes my first reaction is to laugh. Then, a second later, I get worried. This is not funny anymore. This is not a movie: This is real life and could have serious consequences for all of us.
