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Trusting journalism in the age of Trump

SCOTT PIEPHO
Cases and Controversies

Published: December 15, 2017

Last weekend, the New York Times published the latest in a series of jaw-dropping Maggie Haberman/Peter Baker pieces chronicling the inside of President Donald Trump’s White House. Among its least surprising revelations, the story stated that the president watches four to eight hours of cable news per day.

The story also notes that when he learned of fact-checking inquiries sent to the White House as the story was being reported, he held an impromptu press conference during his recent trip to Asia for the purpose of refuting that allegation.

For those of my readers unburdened by addiction to social media it is difficult to exaggerate the degree to which the president’s viewing habits have been documented on Twitter. Matching one of his tweets to a segment on Fox and Friends or Morning Joe has become a cottage industry among Twittercentric journalists.

And it happened again. Monday morning the president took to Twitter to denounce the Times report as “[a]nother false story.” He specifically denied watching MSNBC and bizarrely specifically called out CNN’s Don Lemon who was in no way implicated in the story.

The Times report had been posted online Saturday night and appeared on the front page of the Sunday print edition, raising the question why it caught his attention Monday morning at roughly the same time as the story of a botched bombing in New York was breaking. Then Huffington Post journalist Ashley Feinberg pointed out that the tweet posted soon after a segment covering the Times story on – wait for it – MSNBC’s Morning Joe.

The concentric circles of irony embedded in that presidential tweet highlighted a signal feature of the current political age: How what was once unthinkable becomes unremarkable. The president lied about something that is well documented common knowledge, in the process reiterated his charge that press organs that carry unflattering information are all “Fake News!” but in doing so offered additional evidence to the original story. And it was just another Monday.

The previous week had been billed as bad for the media because a number of media outlets and figures had to issue high-profile corrections. The president had been on an anti-media roll over the weekend, accusing various outlets of intentionally posting fabricated information. He was primed for another antimedia rant Monday morning, whereupon he was apparently prompted by something that was absolutely, positively not a cable news story.

In doing so, he continued his strategy of accusing journalists of intentionally publishing false stories. This strategy moves beyond traditional conservative complaints about liberal bias in journalism. Instead, he urges his steadily shrinking base to disregard any negative report as having been wholly fabricated.

That has been a facet of Trump’s relationship with the press dating back to his days as a moderately successful New York developer. But it also functions to distract his supporters from the very real troubling information about his temperament, his ties to unsavory characters and the self-dealing that has marked his presidency.

The Monday tweet demonstrates the key difference between the president and the news outlets that he howls at. The president is willing to issue transparently false statements and will never back down regardless of how thoroughly his statement is disproven because he knows he can do so with relative impunity. Recall that the week before he was reportedly floating the claim that the Access Hollywood tape—which he previously admitted was him—was in fact faked.

Meanwhile, news outlets are committed to reporting the truth, so when they realize that a report was in error they run a correction. Making mistakes is never a good thing, but they are inevitable in any human enterprise. But journalism as an institution includes mechanisms for checking itself, including fact checkers, competing outlets, and internal ombudsmen. Journalistic ethics also include the necessity of correcting the record upon learning of a mistake.

In the wake of the cluster of errors last week, some media critics openly fretted that the mistakes somehow contributed to distrust in the media. They certainly did not help, but the more important factor has been accusations of serial untruth from a man who evinces little concern for the truth.

Like all institutions that make up a functioning democracy, the media are easy to dislike. Regardless of your politics, the media will uncover inconvenient facts and call political allies to account. They may, for example, devote far too many column inches to a minor political scandal than policy reporting.

We can and should demand continued professionalism from journalists. But we should not let that demand get muddled into the president’s transparently self-serving claim that every news report is false.


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