Stop the Exaggeration
If I were just to be reading headlines, I would think that this past week President Donald Trump threatened war with Australia and Mexico.
Of course, those threats didn’t actually happen, and reading the quotes from the leaders involved in those phone calls tells a different story.
Trump is a loose cannon, and he has already done some very stupid stuff only a couple of weeks into his presidency. The focus should be on what he has clearly done poorly, and the media shouldn’t be searching for every small little mistake and trying to make it another impeachable offense.
To start with Australia, the first headline I saw from The New York Times was “U.S.-Australia Rift Is Possible After Trump Ends Call With Prime Minister” and I was obviously quite concerned. The Times report says the two exchanged “harsh words” and that Trump “abruptly ended the call.” The Washington Post reported that Trump “blasted Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull” and “fumed as Turnbull attempted to confirm that the United States would honor its pledge to take in 1,250 refugees from an Australian detention center.”
However reading quotes from the Australian Prime Minister himself tells a different story. Turnbull told reporters that Trump had affirmed that he would honor the refugee agreement. “I can assure you the relationship is very strong. The fact we received the assurance that we did, the fact that it was confirmed, the very extensive engagement we have with the new administration underlines the closeness of the alliance,” Turnbull said. Turnbull also denied that Trump had hung up on him, and told a Sydney radio station the call had ended “courteously.”
So what’s the huge rift there? The alliance isn’t at stake and diplomatic relations between the two countries aren’t threatened. The Times and The Post are trying to turn every Trump phone call into a horror movie. Yes, the phone call was reportedly “blunt” and “candid” but that should be expected when a President with Trump’s views on immigration is complying with a deal that accepts refugees from Iran, Iraq and Syria among other countries.
This wasn’t even the most egregiously misleading headline about a Trump phone call that I read recently.
“Trump to Mexico: Take care of ‘bad hombres’ or US might” was the headline of the AP about Trump’s talk with Mexico. A spokesmen for the Mexican presidential office said it is “absolutely false that the president of the United States threatened to send troops to Mexico,” and that the tone of the conversation was respectful. However the original AP article said, “Still, the excerpt offers a rare and striking look at how the new president is conducting diplomacy behind closed doors.”
Does this not feel dishonest? Our media is now trying to make us worry about a joke he made in a respectful phone call.
Trump is not threatening Mexico, and our relationship with Australia is not shaky now. It’s a shame we have to read the quotes from other countries spokespeople to feel like we are getting accurate reporting on our president.
How will we make it through four years of this? If Trump actually commits an impeachable offense will people believe the headlines or think the media is crying wolf as it has clearly been doing recently. There are serious ramifications to hyperbolizing everything reported about Trump.
We shouldn’t be up in arms when Trump is making a joke or having a blunt phone call. The focus needs to stay on bigger issues, like his temporary immigration ban or the raid in that clearly shouldn’t have been approved.
Last week a U.S. military raid in Yemen got a Navy Seal killed along with civilians. Shaun King’s headline suggest Trump shouldn’t have signed off on the attack and his actions are why these people are dead “KING: Donald Trump just got people needlessly killed in military raid.” But this headline ignores the fact that the raid was planned and approved by the Obama Administration and the former Defense Secretary had signed off on the raid in the final weeks of Obama’s presidency. Trump only OK’d the raid after current Defense Secretary James Mattis approved it as well.
Trump deserves the utmost scrutiny and reporters should in no way stop hounding him. Trump wants to give the power back to the people, and the only way for the people to know what is going on in the White House is through the media.
That being said, trying to make everything that Trump does sound like the end of the world is dishonest and stupid. It’s why Trump can get away with calling news outlets like CNN fake news. The often unnecessarily draconian rhetoric of the media enables Trump to hit back just as hard. Tough but fair coverage is the only way forward, Trump will make mistakes and turn people against him on his own, the media shouldn’t be trying so hard to make it happen. The biased reporting turns more people against the media than Trump.
