by Howard Kurtz
As if that wasn’t enough, Arianna Huffington’s website held its nose by ending every Trump article with this editor’s note: “Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims—1.6 billion members of an entire religion—from entering the U.S.”
Other media outlets openly moved into the anti-Trump camp as well. Subtlety was not required.
In the New Yorker, Editor David Remnick wrote: “The election of Donald Trump to the presidency is nothing less than a tragedy for the American republic, a tragedy for the Constitution, and a triumph for the forces, at home and abroad, of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism.”
Noah Shachtman, executive editor of the Daily Beast, wrote that “if you’re renting in a Trump building or playing a round of golf at a Trump resort, you are supporting racism and neo-fascism.” And he flat-out called for “a boycott of Trump’s businesses,” presumably addressing all those racist golfers. This was the man supervising the site’s reporters.
At New York magazine, writer Emily Yoshida tweeted this appeal: “Men of NYC if you want to be good allies please form a perimeter around Trump Tower at 6PM and start peeing.”
At the pop culture site BuzzFeed, the editor Ben Smith, a former Politico reporter, called Trump a “mendacious racist.”
Smith was telling his staff that it was perfectly acceptable to use such terms on social media because the candidate was “out there saying things that are false, and running an overtly anti-Muslim campaign. BuzzFeed News’s reporting is rooted in facts, not opinion; these are facts.”
That might have been the most troubling declaration: that Trump’s racism was simply an undisputed fact, not a journalist’s assessment, and that there was no room for dissent on this score.
Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, had a long-running feud with Trump dating to the 1980s, when he helped run Spy magazine, which branded the real estate mogul a “thick-fingered vulgarian.” (Trump told me it was “a garbage magazine.”) Now, after predicting Trump’s defeat in his glossy pages, Carter called him a “preening narcissist” who “may well be the most ridiculed man in history.”
When these and other editors and commentators railed against Donald Trump, there was no backlash from their peers. By and large, they received knowing smiles and high fives. Most people in their circles, from Manhattan to Malibu, believed pretty much the same thing. Trump was an affront to their refined sensibilities. And if he remained stubbornly popular, well, no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.
A burgeoning resentment of Donald Trump stretched well beyond people in the opinion business, touching major news organizations as well.
Trump had complained to me, for instance, that the Twitter account of Jonathan Martin, a top political reporter for the New York Times, was “just horrible.” And that wasn’t the end of it.
Weeks before the convention, an RNC staff member called Martin one night to challenge one of his stories. The reporter shot back, “You’re a racist and a fascist; Donald Trump is a racist and a fascist, we all know it, and you are complicit. By supporting him you’re all culpable.”
During the fall campaign, the party staffer called him again, and Martin accused the staffer—and everyone working on Trump’s behalf—of supporting a racist campaign and a racist candidate.
This time the staffer was distraught and relayed the conversation to the boss, Sean Spicer. Spicer called a top Times editor and unloaded about Martin’s behavior. The editor thanked Spicer for the information.
Half an hour later, Martin called Spicer and demanded: “How dare you go behind my back? What are you doing calling one of my editors?” “Excuse me,” Spicer replied, “you call one of my people and say this and I don’t have a right to complain?”
The bias even seeped into routine coverage. When protestors snuck onto a Trump golf course in California and carved six-foot letters into the greens, this was the lead sentence in a Washington Post news story: “Environmental activists pulled off a daring act of defiance.” It was impossible to imagine such a description of vandalism at property owned by any other president. The paper acknowledged the blunder in an editor’s note.
Sometimes the smug certainty was cringe-worthy. Stephanie Ruhle, a daytime news anchor at MSNBC, tipped her hand by asking Kellyanne Conway how she could possibly justify working for Trump.
“You’ve got to look at your kids when you go to bed at night,” Ruhle said, noting that she didn’t let her own children watch Trump.
Conway was deeply offended at such an unfair comment that clearly insinuated her candidate was beyond the pale; given the struggles of her own childhood, she didn’t need any lectures about family.
Perhaps the starkest contrast in the coverage of candidate Trump was at the major newspapers, which devoted untold acres of newsprint to challenging and correcting him, digging into everything from his real estate dealings to his casino bankruptcies to whether he cheated at golf.
Taken one at a time, some of these stories—such as the Washington Post’s Pulitzer Prize–winning series on problems with his charitable donations—were perfectly legitimate. But the sheer tonnage was overwhelming, as if part of a coordinated campaign to undermine and expose a single candidate.
In the summer of 2016, it fell to Jim Rutenberg, the savvy media columnist at the New York Times, to justify the massive imbalance of press coverage in a remarkable and much-quoted piece that reflected the mindset of his newspaper and so many other media outlets:
If you’re a working journalist and you believe that Donald J. Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalistic tendencies, that he cozies up to anti-American dictators and that he would be dangerous with control of the United States nuclear codes, how the heck are you supposed to cover him?
Because if you believe all of those things, you have to throw out the textbook American journalism has been using for the better part of the past half-century, if not longer, and approach it in a way you’ve never approached anything in your career. If you view a Trump presidency as something that’s potentially dangerous, then your reporting is going to reflect that. You would move closer than you’ve ever been to being oppositional. That’s uncomfortable and uncharted territory for every mainstream, non-opinion journalist I’ve ever known, and by normal standards, untenable.
“Let’s face it,” Rutenberg acknowledged, “Balance has been on vacation since Mr. Trump stepped onto his golden Trump Tower escalator last year to announce his candidacy. For the primaries and caucuses, the imbalance played to his advantage, captured by the killer statistic of the season: His nearly $2 billion in free media was more than six times as much as that of his closest Republican rival.”
This figure, based on an endlessly repeated estimate, missed the mark. Yes, early on, the cable news networks provided live coverage of many Trump rallies because he was so unpredictable and entertaining. But much of the so-called free media was actually earned by Trump in the process of doing hundreds and hundreds of interviews. From network morning shows to nighttime cable shows to Sunday shows, Trump exposed himself to constant questioning, even when negative stories were in the air and he knew he would get beat up, and that meant he dominated press coverage of the Republican primary campaign.
It was far harder for these shows to book Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Jeb Bush, and the rest, and when they did appear they made little news (and were often asked about Trump). Hillary Clinton was rarely available, even on such friendly outlets as MSNBC, and largely hid from her press corps, while Trump regularly answered reporters’ questions.
Rutenberg’s bottom line was that the media suspended their “normal standards” because Trump was not a normal candidate. But when journalists changed the rules for one White House contender, they abandoned fairness for activism. They became crusaders against the supposed menace of Trumpism. And, of course
, they assumed they would be vindicated in the end because Trump couldn’t possibly win the election.
After Trump was sworn in, Rutenberg told me: “This is an extraordinary administration, President Trump is an extraordinary public figure, and there is going to be a different way of covering him.”
Margaret Sullivan, the Washington Post media columnist, and a respected onetime editor of the Buffalo News and former New York Times ombudsman, argued that Trump could not be treated like any other president.
In a post-election column titled “A Hellscape of Lies and Distorted Reality Awaits Journalists Covering President Trump,” Sullivan opined that “we can expect President Trump to lie to the media, manipulate reality and go after those who upset the notion that adulation is his birthright.” Another column was headlined, “How Much Normalizing Does an Abnormal President Deserve?”
This newfound mission of policing the Trump presidency came at a time of deep decline in the news business. The newspaper industry had lost nearly half its editorial jobs over a quarter-century. Network news divisions employed far fewer correspondents. Two of the three major newsmagazines essentially disappeared as print products. The result was a decimation of original reporting, and while many jobs shifted to newsy websites, the plain fact is original reporting was far less valued by the new media culture.
The coin of the realm was now the hot take, batted out for quick clicks. Even people in straightforward reporting jobs were expected to provide instant punditry, to make pronouncements and predictions on rapid-fire cable news segments, to build a snarky persona on Twitter. The lines between news and opinion were not just blurred, they were all but obliterated.
In a fiercely polarized political climate, media outlets increasingly took sides on the left or the right. For media moguls anxious, appalled, or horrified by the forty-fifth president, there were undeniable financial incentives to cater to an anti-Trump audience hungry for stories critical of the president.
When the Washington Post suddenly emblazoned a slogan under its masthead—“Democracy Dies in Darkness”—you had to wonder why no threat of darkness was perceived during the Obama administration, which conducted secret surveillance of journalists and dragged them into criminal leak prosecutions. Slate, which is owned by the Washington Post, pitched subscribers with the slogan “Help Us Hold Trump Accountable.”
And it was working. At the New York Times, print and online subscriptions grew at ten times the usual rate—132,000 people—in the days after the election, and Executive Editor Dean Baquet credited Trump.
But such financial gains came at a steep price for the reputation of the mainstream press, because the more that these outlets emphasized what Rutenberg called oppositional reporting, the more they seemed overtly anti-Trump, the more they eroded their credibility with conservatives and many independents.
And because there is a natural human tendency to push back when the president is calling your network “fake news” or your newspaper “evil,” the anti-Trump mindset of the media became a self-perpetuating cycle: Media outlets overdosed on negative stories about Trump, who in turn attacked them with harsh language, which in turn drove them deeper into anti-Trump territory, which they defended by cloaking themselves in the First Amendment.
The damage cuts deeper than day-to-day reports. Many people no longer believe the polls or the fact-checking columns trumpeted by news organizations. Conservatives have complained for decades about media bias, but many liberals now join in the indictment.
The press has always tried to function as a referee in factual disputes. But the whistle has been yanked away and all too often we no longer agree on a common set of facts. Now each side, whether it’s Trump or the mainstream media, tries to utterly discredit the opposition.
Donald Trump feels he is awash in phony news, the journalists feel deluged by presidential chicanery, and Americans wrap themselves in media cocoons that validate their opinions and shut out contrary views. If truth is the first casualty of war, it is also increasingly the victim of the Trump wars. And that is especially bad news for the media, which once claimed a monopoly on the truth but have frittered away much of the public’s confidence.
I certainly don’t think journalists are bad people, although there are a few mean-spirited folks on both sides. Many are misguided in their belief that they are doing the right thing, and myopic in their rationalizations about why it’s perfectly fine to treat Trump differently than other presidents.
They are not “enemies of the American people,” as Trump puts it, a phrase that goes way too far with its traitorous overtones. They are, however, their own worst enemies.
CHAPTER 4
A QUESTION OF LOYALTY
Sean Spicer thought it was such a journalistic outrage that he didn’t even have to pick up the phone.
Here was a national reporter who had smeared both the president-elect and his daughter in the most obscene fashion possible, and Politico had already terminated her contract. Julia Ioffe, who ticked off the campaign earlier with a condescending profile of Melania Trump as a trophy wife, had accepted a job offer from the Atlantic.
But that was before she posted a nasty tweet about Ivanka Trump’s growing influence in the new White House: “Either Trump is fucking his daughter or he’s shirking nepotism laws. Which is worse?”
The incoming White House press secretary called Jeffrey Goldberg, the nationally known foreign policy writer who had recently become the Atlantic’s editor.
“I’m just doing due diligence here,” Spicer said. “I assume you’re going to fire her.”
“Well, she apologized. Everyone deserves a second chance,” Goldberg said.
Spicer was stunned. “She didn’t get a fact wrong,” he yelled. “She suggested the next president of the United States might be fucking his daughter.”
Goldberg pleaded for understanding: “Come on, haven’t you said some stupid shit in your life?”
“I say stupid shit every day,” Spicer shot back. “I have never suggested anyone, much less a president, is fucking his daughter.”
Goldberg thought what Ioffe had done was terrible, but after long management meetings discussing the matter, he had decided not to destroy her career over this misstep.
Goldberg told Spicer they would have to agree to disagree, then softened his tone: “I know our relations haven’t been great, I’d like to reset things for the future.”
Spicer stood his ground, saying that if Ioffe were to work there, “we’ll never talk to you.”
“Sean, you never talk to us anyway.”
Goldberg later told colleagues that Spicer had guaranteed Ioffe’s employment, because he couldn’t let an incoming administration tell him whom to hire or fire.
A veteran political operative, a Navy Reserve officer, and a graduate of the Naval War College, the compact, sandy-haired Spicer was willing to take plenty of incoming fire for his new boss. Yet he was an unlikely choice as press secretary.
Laura Ingraham, the radio host and Fox News commentator who spoke at Trump’s convention, had declined to join the White House, concluding that as the single mother of three children she would be better off tending to her media empire. Steve Bannon, the president’s chief strategist, along with Kellyanne Conway and the Trump kids, had pushed for Kimberly Guilfoyle, a Fox News host and former prosecutor. But Trump told people that he “had to keep a promise”—that Reince Priebus and Sean Spicer, both from the Republican National Committee, had come as a package deal.
Spicer hadn’t always been in the Trump camp. As a protégé of Priebus, who made him senior strategist when he ran the RNC, Spicer had grown agitated during the primaries when Trump would complain about a “rigged system,” feeling that was demoralizing to the field troops who were working so hard.
Priebus himself had strained relations with Trump during the campaign, especially after lecturing him for announcing his candidacy by saying that rapists were among the illegal immigrants coming into the country from Mexico.
And Priebus seemed to endanger any chance he had of joining a potential Trump administration a month before the election.
After the Washington Post posted the Access Hollywood tape, the nominee gathered his top advisers at Trump Tower: Priebus, Bannon, Jared Kushner, Hope Hicks, Rudy Giuliani, and Chris Christie were there. Most of them were down in the dumps.
“What are you hearing?” Trump asked.
“You’re going to lose big and you should withdraw,” Priebus said. Republicans were saying that he faced a landslide loss of Barry Goldwater proportions.
Priebus was tired of what he regarded as the sycophancy of other Trump aides who said things weren’t so bad. He felt he owed Trump a blunt assessment. But the candidate insisted he would not lose, and warned that if the party abandoned him, “I will take you all down with me.” Corey Lewandowski got into a shouting match with Priebus before the second debate, saying, “Go fuck yourself, Reince.”
Trump’s team had doubts about both Priebus and Spicer as establishment Republicans. Trump aides heard rumors that the day before the election, Spicer had briefed top people at the networks on the RNC’s data that explained why Trump would lose.
The rumor was, in fact, a slight exaggeration of what actually happened. Spicer didn’t predict Trump would lose but had told media figures like Rupert Murdoch at Fox and Joe Scarborough at MSNBC that Trump was not likely to win, and had been at RNC briefings where a colleague had used stronger language. The tale had reached the president-elect.
At a dinner at Mar-a-Lago, Trump told aides that he was reluctant to pick Spicer because “he wasn’t loyal.”
Once Trump tapped Priebus, who had the support of Ivanka and Jared Kushner, however, his new chief of staff made it clear he wanted Spicer as press secretary. Trump appreciated Spicer’s fighting, Navy side that had been showcased on television during the campaign, and went along. Joining Spicer would be veteran spokesman Jason Miller, who was going to be named White House communications director, and who had been a key campaign and transition team spokesman.