Media Madness

by Howard Kurtz

  Trump had grown accustomed to favorable media treatment during his long career in New York: brand-building stories from the business press, celebrity stories of feuds and dalliances from the tabloids. He would regularly call the editor of the New York Post to plant stories and was rewarded with “BEST SEX I EVER HAD” headlines; he let a Daily News reporter come to the hospital when his second wife Marla Maples was having a baby. So, he was initially stunned when he became a politician and the press pummeled him.

  As president, Trump begins his day with four newspapers—New York Times, New York Post, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post. He watches the White House press briefings in the afternoon, and spends his evenings surfing cable news. He uses a TiVo (“one of the great inventions of all time”) to replay cable shows he’s missed while working or traveling. And Hope Hicks, who had Google alerts set up for key surrogates and allies, sometimes showed him clips on her phone.

  Sometimes, when Trump saw guests ably defending him, he told Sean Spicer to call them and say the president thought they did a good job. When Trump saw what he deemed unfair reporting or punditry, he used Twitter to trash the offending show or network. And occasionally he tweeted something favorable about Fox & Friends or Hannity.

  Trump told three New York Times journalists that he had given up sports and was “consumed by news.” Using a remote control and a sixty-inch flat screen, he showed them excerpts of congressional testimony by Sally Yates, the former acting attorney general he had fired, and James Clapper, Obama’s national intelligence director and an outspoken critic. And he provided color commentary as he fast-forwarded to key parts. “Watch them choke like dogs,” the president said. He was in his element.

  Ironically, given his forty million Twitter followers, Trump rarely looked at the web. But if staffers handed him printouts of articles they thought important, he read them.

  Trump knows how to hold an audience, and the constant churn of his presidency—the plot twists, the palace intrigue, the threats and retreats and deadline drama—reflects that.

  The Trump Show is never dull, which is why he has lifted the ratings and clicks for networks and websites, transformed Facebook into a political battleground, and put national politics at the center of our culture. The media’s largely negative approach to the show has produced a paradox: while their credibility has eroded, their bottom line has grown fatter.

  CHAPTER 17

  THE MEDIA GO TO DEFCON 1

  The Washington Post newsroom broke into applause when the numbers flashed on the video monitor.

  The Post’s explosive story on Donald Trump and Russia had just broken the clicks-per-minute record on its website, previously held by the paper’s posting of the Access Hollywood tape.

  On May 15, the Post reported that during an Oval Office meeting with Russia’s foreign minister and ambassador, Trump had disclosed highly classified data—dubbed “code word” information—about an ISIS terror threat involving laptops on airplanes.

  The information was so sensitive that the Post withheld most details of the plot at the urging of federal officials, and senior White House aides contacted the CIA and NSA to discuss the possible fallout.

  The White House press team moved quickly. Raised voices were heard as Steve Bannon met with Sean Spicer and his staff in the Cabinet room. H. R. McMaster, the new national security adviser (and someone that the White House told the Weekly Standard that Trump held in high esteem, precisely because there were leaks that he didn’t—that he lectured Trump and lacked rapport with him), was tapped to read a statement.

  The blunt general did his duty. McMaster said the Washington Post story was “false,” that he had been in the room, and that “at no time were any intelligence sources or methods discussed.” The article, however, hadn’t said that sources or methods were compromised, although the leak could have led to that. It was, in journalistic parlance, a nondenial denial.

  The paper acknowledged that no law had been broken because the president has the power to declassify information. But the story’s obvious news value was enormously amplified because it played into a larger media narrative: that Trump would do anything to help the Russians. That Trump was too unsophisticated to grasp the nuances of intelligence matters. That Trump was a danger to national security.

  Glenn Thrush of the New York Times snarked on Twitter about “Reported fact-chain: 1) Comey requests more $ for Russia probe 2) Trump cans Comey 3) Trump invites Russians to Oval, divulges state secrets.” Even if he hadn’t included the debunked story about Comey having asked for more resources, the tweet conveyed a reporter’s view that Trump was an unwitting tool for Moscow.

  Less than twenty-four hours later, the Times quoted from a James Comey memo, read by an unnamed associate, saying the president had suggested to him that he drop the Michael Flynn investigation: “He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.”

  The media went to DEFCON 1.

  The instant consensus was that this was an obstruction of justice, a scandal of Watergate proportions: the president was trying to pressure his FBI director to stop an investigation of his former national security adviser’s ties to Russia. It was a slam-dunk case! Donald Trump had finally been exposed.

  Joe Scarborough spoke of “a president that is increasingly isolated, increasingly enraged, and increasingly out of touch with the realities of what is required to run this office.”

  Lawrence O’Donnell announced that “Donald Trump now sits at the threshold of impeachment.” The Atlantic declared that “Donald Trump’s presidency appears to be on the verge of collapse.” The New Yorker said that “discussion of Trump’s presidency ending before his four-year term is up is no longer an oppositional fantasy.” The degree of wishful thinking was astonishing.

  The Weekly Standard described a “car-wreck presidency.” Slate announced that “it’s the beginning of the end for Donald Trump.” The Huffington Post asked, “CAN HE SURVIVE?” David Brooks called Trump “a 7-year-old boy” who is “perpetually desperate for approval.” Stephen Colbert crowed, “You’re a bad president, please resign.” And one CNN and MSNBC anchor after another asked Democratic lawmakers whether Trump had committed impeachable offenses.

  Comey’s account was unquestionably troubling, and while Trump may have had a strong case for firing the FBI chief, his shifting explanations had made the matter a mess. The day after the New York Times story hit, Rod Rosenstein named former FBI director Robert Mueller as a special counsel to investigate possible Russian meddling in the presidential election.

  The media sharks smelled blood, especially after Sean Spicer canceled his regular, televised briefing with reporters. Then, on May 19, minutes after the president left on his first foreign trip, the New York Times reported that Trump had told the Russian diplomats that Comey was “crazy, a real nut job,” and that the firing relieved “great pressure” on him because of Russia. (Spicer later said he meant pressure on his ability to negotiate with Russia.) The Washington Post reported that investigators were looking at a “senior White House official” as a “person of interest,” which raised the stakes. Boom. Boom. Boom. It was hard for anyone, even journalists, to keep up.

  Some anchors became short-tempered. Anderson Cooper snapped at Trump loyalist Jeffrey Lord that even if the president “took a dump on his desk, you’d defend him.” He apologized for his “crude” and “unprofessional” crack.

  There were also backslapping rounds of self-congratulation. A New York Times columnist praised the Washington Post’s Trump scoops and its adding of hundreds of thousands of digital subscribers as “little short of astonishing.” A Washington Post columnist said Trump had prodded both papers into producing “one breathtaking scoop after another,” listing the names of fourteen journalists.

  But here’s what the media, in their rush to judgment, failed to consider: that James Comey, fired in humiliating fashion, might have motives of his own in leaking against Trump. The tall, imposing Comey put out through intermediaries th
at he was so wary of Trump that he once hid from him, ducking behind curtains at a reception and trying, unsuccessfully, to deflect a Trump hug with an arm’s-length handshake. Instead of treating this as unusual behavior, even for Washington, the press touted Comey as a man of unimpeachable integrity, with every orchestrated leak from his friends or other unnamed officials regarded as absolute truth. Trump, as usual, got no benefit of the doubt. The press showed no curiosity as to why top government officials were handing journalists story after story designed to damage the president.

  Perhaps most important, journalists glossed over the fact that despite all the revelations and headlines, there was still no firm evidence that the Trump campaign had “colluded” with the Russians.

  Even Bob Woodward, the preeminent champion of investigative reporting, felt compelled to say that some journalists were biased and “binge-drinking the anti-Trump Kool-Aid.”

  Trump’s media defenders aimed their fire at the mainstream press. On Fox News, commentator Jesse Watters decreed it a “boring” scandal. Tucker Carlson accused the media of “hyperventilating,” which he blamed on newsrooms “where every single person has exactly the same political views.…They’re destroying themselves.”

  Fox News was increasingly seen as in the pro-Trump camp, but the reality was more complicated. It was undeniably true that the president and his top aides made the majority of their appearances on Fox, in part because they had all but written off CNN and MSNBC. Trump’s preferred interviewers were Sean Hannity, Jeanine Pirro, and the hosts at Fox & Friends, who were openly sympathetic. And Fox’s prime-time opinion shows, while covering damaging controversies, tended not to dwell on them or insisted they were overblown.

  But the news division, led by programs such as Bret Baier’s Special Report, covered Trump fairly, if without the reflexive animosity that marked much of the programming on MSNBC and CNN. The Fox conservative commentators who opposed Trump during the campaign—Charles Krauthammer, Karl Rove, Rich Lowry, Jonah Goldberg, and Steve Hayes among them—remained largely critical, though they sometimes offered limited praise. The Fox audience was split, with some complaining that the network was too soft on Trump and others rebelling at the mildest criticism.

  Aside from Fox, most of the media were in fact aligned against Trump. Harvard researchers found that major media coverage of his first hundred days was 80 percent negative, a figure that jumped to 93 percent negative for CNN and NBC, and 91 percent for CBS. (On Fox, it was 52 percent negative, 48 percent positive.)

  Even some in the media’s liberal precincts were tapping on the brakes, recognizing that the press’s normal fixation on scandal might be reaching insane levels. The New York Times editorial page said that “really bad stuff could turn up. But Watergate? We’re not there yet. That’s a word that summons obstruction on a monumental scale, with evidence to prove overt criminal acts.” And its ombudsman Liz Spayd, while praising the paper’s reporting, worried about “a slide toward coverage that can be misperceived as rooting for Trump’s demise.” That is sometimes how it looked. (The paper soon abolished her job.)

  Yet Trump had also given his antagonists plenty of ammunition: firing the FBI director, shifting his story, telling Russian diplomats that Comey was crazy, and denouncing the probe rather than blandly pledging cooperation. And, as usual, he kept on talking about it.

  The day after the Mueller appointment, Trump held an off-the-record luncheon for network anchors, ostensibly to brief them on his first foreign trip. At a time when he was under absolute siege by the media, the president nonetheless devoted two hours, over salad and short ribs, to several of the news organizations he had branded “fake news.”

  Jared Kushner, an elusive figure to the press, chatted with reporters, saying, “This is probably the weirdest job I’ve ever had.” In his previous life, “I’ve failed at more deals than I’ve done but I’ve closed 250 building deals. I know how to make a deal.…This country didn’t get fucked up in 100 days and it’s not going to get fixed in 100 days.”

  With off-the-record protection, Trump let loose. He said he was Vladimir Putin’s “worst nightmare.” He called Comey “a mental mess. Look in his eyes—that guy’s got problems.”

  When ABC’s David Muir asked about the naming of the special counsel, Trump said: “I believe it hurts our country terribly, because it shows we’re a divided, mixed-up, not-unified country.…It also happens to be a pure excuse for the Democrats having lost an election that they should have easily won because of the Electoral College being slanted so much in their way.”

  As the session ended, the anchors clamored for those quotes to be put on the record. “Wait a minute,” Kushner shouted, “you all have to go through Hope!” They knew Trump had given in to such requests before.

  As the president started shaking hands, Sean Spicer came running up with a tape recorder to catch any remarks. In the crosstalk, Trump told the anchors “that last part we talked about, yeah,” it could be put on the record.

  Hicks suddenly took charge: “I will send the quote out at 3 so no one gets a jump. You have to run it in its entirety,” she said.

  At a news conference an hour later, Trump essentially repeated his remarks, calling the probe a “witch hunt” and denying that he had asked Comey to drop the Flynn investigation. He often tried out his responses in off-the-record settings and then went public.

  The battle lines were now drawn: James Comey, whom the press believed to be an honorable man, versus Donald Trump, whom the press did not believe at all. The press backlash was far greater than the White House had expected.

  The media also took aim at the president’s staff. Trump was ready for “a major shakeup,” the New York Times said, “probably starting with the dismissal or reassignment of Sean Spicer,” who might be pulled from the daily briefings. Fox commentator Kimberly Guilfoyle was quoted as saying she was in talks with the White House for the job—she had been Trump’s early favorite for press secretary—but Fox News let it be known that she was under a long-term contract.

  This was why the infighting stories mattered, because the anonymous knifing fed a narrative of presidential dysfunction. “They seem to palpate with contempt for him,” conservative Times columnist Ross Douthat said.

  Campaign veterans shook their heads at what one called the administration’s “managed chaos” and how leakers, in order to protect their own reputations, sacrificed the president, portraying him as petulant, impulsive, and uninformed. And they knew how frustrated Trump was; he couldn’t understand why the press harped on collusion with Russia when he insisted there wasn’t any.

  Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s former campaign manager, spoke out in his defense, saying any staffer who couldn’t support Trump’s agenda “should not be there” and that those leaking derogatory information “should be fired.” The president invited him to the Oval Office; he was back in demand. But it was a sad commentary that Trump loyalists had to defend the president by attacking his staff.

  Mike Pence, the soft-spoken, white-haired former Indiana governor, was a media favorite in the early months of the administration. The main reason was that he wasn’t Donald Trump.

  The vice president was “a clean-cut 1950s Republican” who seemed “jarringly out of place” in the chaotic White House, a New York Times profile said. Some viewed him “as a president-in-waiting,” if Trump was “brought down by scandal.”

  Perhaps the most controversial thing about Pence, at least in the eyes of liberals, turned out to be a fifteen-year-old quote. A sympathetic Washington Post profile of his wife Karen, a devout Christian, noted in the twentieth paragraph that Mike had once said “that he never eats alone with a woman other than his wife and that he won’t attend events featuring alcohol without her by his side, either.”

  This prompted a spate of smug essays about whether Pence was sexist, or silly, to observe such old-fashioned morality. Yet it was hardly an uncommon practice among religious Christians. With so many politicians embroiled in sex s
candals, Pence was pilloried for trying to avoid temptation.

  He had made no mistakes for months, but that wasn’t good enough for some in the press. Pence was, according to Politico, “the White House’s Invisible Man,” someone who had earned Trump’s trust but had “racked up few tangible accomplishments.” Of course, the job of a vice president is to loyally serve the president, not leak stories about how much clout he’s wielding.

  By the spring, however, the media had turned on Pence. “What Did Mike Pence Know?” CNN asked.

  Slate ripped him as “Mr. Complicit.” As scandalous doings swirled around the White House, the vice president was a “stooge,” following a path of “willful blindness and misrepresentations.…He continues to vouch for President Trump and others who conspire, lie, and hide corruption. Pence isn’t a victim. He’s an accomplice.” Merely for standing by the president who picked him, he was a bad guy.

  Pence occasionally punched back, scolding “left-wing activists and their willing allies in the media” for spreading “fake news.”

  It was fair for the press to observe that Pence sometimes seemed in the dark, whether it was defending Mike Flynn on television after the national security adviser had lied to him about Russia, or defending the Jim Comey firing as having been based solely on the deputy attorney general’s recommendation. The press treated these episodes as embarrassments.

  For the most part, Pence remained unflappable. He was, though, annoyed by media reports that played up protests at his commencement speech at Notre Dame. Only about one hundred of the thirty-two hundred graduates had walked out from his remarks in protest—and they were booed as they did so.

  On The View, Whoopi Goldberg supported the protestors by offering a KKK analogy: “I shouldn’t have to listen to a guy who’s wearing a hood, who I know wants to string me up,” as if the mild-mannered Pence was anything remotely like a klansman.