Trump and the Media
Lynn Woolley selfie at the New York Times 12-21-19
As a general rule, most presidents don’t like negative news coverage.
President Donald Trump, in particular, wants all news coverage to be glowing. He makes this clear when he gets a question that seems to challenge a policy or something he has said. The President will often demean a reporter by calling him or her a terrible person, or saying that an offending network is crooked. That’s his right to say, but Trump goes further, suing some news agencies or even threatening to pull broadcast licenses.
This is over the line.
The media, also known as the Fourth Estate, is supposed to ask hard questions. Reporters are supposed to dig, probe, and be the eyes and ears of the people. Note that there is no free press in Russia, China, or Iran, and those countries are all dictatorships. It’s true that some media are better than others. Some are fair and some are not. But without them, we’d be in big trouble.
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There is a concept in Europe of three estates: the clergy, the nobility, and the commoners. In America, we have three branches of government: the executive, the legislative, and the judicial. We can think of the “press,” now commonly called the media, as a fourth component. By reporting the news, the media has inherent power to shape opinion, and even influence what politicians do.
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Some cases in point would include Teapot Dome, Watergate, and even the more recent situation in which Joe Biden was said to have profited from selling influence. These scandals would only grow and proliferate if there were no media to ferret them out and report them.
It doesn’t mean that there’s no corruption in media; there certainly is, and you saw a case of it a few years back in which CBS Evening News Anchor Dan Rather lost his job over biased reporting about George W. Bush. This happens, and it will continue to happen. That does not change the fact that politicians need watching, and it’s the media’s job to keep them honest.
Video: ‘You’re a terrible person’: Trump slams ABC News reporter after Epstein question
A word about anonymous sources.
We all know about Mark Felt, the long-time anonymous source known as “Deep Throat” who spilled the beans about Watergate to Woodward and Bernstein. No matter what you think about that particular scandal, it brought down a president, and it has become a part of the culture to the extent that most of today’s scandals are suffixed with the word “gate.” Without an anonymous source, this story might never have broken, or been as significant as it was.
Anonymous sources are anathema to politicians. They hate anonymous sources the way normal people hate mosquitoes. They’d like to force them into the open so they could be fired, and so that all these types of sources would dry up. That would be a great benefit to politicians but not to you. If you want an honest government, and one in which politicians think twice before doing something shady, you ought to understand that anonymous sources are the number one key to breaking stories about corruption in our government. That’s why reporters rarely ever rat them out. If they betray these sources, there will be no more of them.
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Note that a former Hunter Biden associate called Tony Bobulinski came forward with allegations about Joe Biden’s involvement in Hunter’s business deals, though nothing ever came of it.
Trump and the News Media.
The President often goes above and beyond calling a repeater a terrible person. He sues them, threatens them, and sometimes, the Department of Justice subpoenas them. Here are some current examples.
Trump has sued CBS News and ABC News. This is kind of unprecedented, and the networks have responded by settling. In the case of CBS News, it was about deceptive editing of a Kamala Harris interview to make her sound coherent. Making Harris sound coherent is a tall order, but CBS was involved in a merger deal that had to go through the Republican-controlled Federal Communications Commission. The settlement probably seemed wise to company lawyers.
ABC News settled over comments on “This Week” by the “Face of ABC News” that happens to be George Stephanopoulos, who is a former political operative for Bill Clinton. Stephanopoulos, in my opinion, was a bad hire. It’s difficult to think of him as an objective reporter, and his unfortunate comments about a Trump case involving rape cost ABC News a small fortune.
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I think Trump ought to have called out these things, as both networks could have done better, and especially ABC. (In a partial defense of CBS, I’ll say that radio and TV station edit interviews all the time. The practice is common, usually to cut to the meat of the interview and for timing. Lots of footage from media interviews end upon the cutting room floor. Trump should have called them out, and let it go.)
Trump rips Maggie Haberman of the New York Times. Again, lots of politicians do not like reporters, but Trump issues a threat against Haberman, saying she will “pay the price” for reporting on his health. He called her “Maggot Hagerman” (sic) and threatened a $1 billion-dollar lawsuit against what he called “the failing New York Times.” She had questioned his cognitive health. I questioned Biden’s. So did dozens of other reporters. No one threatened to sue. Trump went on to defend his mental state, and that’s fine. That should have been enough.
New York Times reporters subpoenaed over Air Force One reporting. This one disturbs me. The DOJ likely did not do this without urging from Trump. This involves security issues surrounding the new Air Force One jet donated by Qatar. Trump had abruptly switched back to the old AF1 when leaving a NATO summit, likely due to a threat from Iran to target him. Let me get this straight: A newspaper reports on a story that now appears to be true, and the feds show up to haul the reporters before a grand jury. Are we freaking Russia?
We have a free press that is protected by the First Amendment and we’d better fight to keep it.
I don’t blame Trump for despising the media any more than I would blame Richard Nixon. But imagine a country where all the newspaper, radio and TV news stories were about how great a job the President and other politicians are doing. That’s the way it is in “Dear Leader” countries like Russia and China, and trust me, we do not want that here.
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That’s why media advocates seem alarmed by some of these actions. They’ve called the administration “brazen,” and seem to think we are in uncharted territory. They’re right. Suppose Kamala Harris or Gavin Newsom, or (God forbid) Pete Buttigieg becomes president. Or an Islamist like Zohran Mamdani, who thankfully is not eligible to run. But Alexandria Ocasio Cortez can run, and she may. What if Trump’s attempts to intimidate the media or to sue and subpoena then carry over to a Democrat president?
Trump would be far better to just answer hard questions and move on. So would the United States of America.
Lynn Woolley is a Texas-based author, broadcaster, and songwriter. Follow his podcast at https://www.PlanetLogic.us. Check out his author’s page at https://www.Amazon.com/author/lynnwoolley. Order books direct from Lynn at https://PlanetLogicPress.Square.Site.
Email Lynn at lwoolley9189@gmail.com.
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