Media Madness

by Howard Kurtz

  As Mitch McConnell and other leading Republicans urged the nominee to withdraw, Trump felt compelled to address the controversy.

  Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement, “The president believes that we cannot allow a mere allegation—in this case, one from many years ago—to destroy a person’s life. However, the president also believes that if these allegations are true, Judge Moore will do the right thing and step aside.” She read the remarks to reporters on an Air Force One flight in Vietnam, and it made far more news than Trump’s visit over the previous week to Japan, South Korea, and China. The president had been disciplined and restrained on the Asia trip, and that had yielded only modest coverage.

  Trump spoke to reporters on the next flight, to Hanoi, and stirred controversy by saying that he had asked again about Russian hacking of the election during an informal conversation with Vladimir Putin: “Every time he sees me he says I didn’t do that and I really believe that when he tells me that, he means it.”

  Many commentators argued that Trump had embarrassed the country by expressing his belief in Putin’s denials. The White House disputed that interpretation and the president had to clean it up, saying all he meant was that Putin believed it, while Trump himself believed the American intelligence agency findings on the hacking—and adding a blast at the “haters and fools” who opposed a better relationship with Russia. (The story got more complicated when the Atlantic reported that Donald Trump Jr. had secretly communicated with WikiLeaks during the campaign, complying with its request to have his father tweet a link to the shadowy group’s posting of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s hacked emails.)

  During the same in-flight gaggle, a reporter asked Trump whether the Republican Party should ditch Roy Moore as its candidate. Ivanka would annoy her father by saying there was “a special place in hell” for people like Moore “who prey on children.”

  Trump said he had been too busy on the trip to follow the details of the story back home. But, he added, “even when I’m in Washington and New York, I do not watch much television. I know they like to say, people that don’t know me, they like to say I watch television. People with fake sources—you know, fake reporters, fake sources. But I don’t get to watch much television, primarily because of documents. I’m reading documents a lot.”

  It was a fleeting snapshot of his presidency. The media again tried to put Trump on the defensive over what most journalists considered his strangely cordial relationship with Putin at a time when a special counsel remained in hot pursuit of any improper collusion with Russia. The media were also trying to draw him into a tawdry sex scandal involving a candidate he had tried to defeat in a Senate primary, with some resurrecting the harassment allegations that had flared up at the end of Trump’s own campaign. And Donald Trump had hit back with a shot at “fake reporters.”

  But while Trump kept ignoring reporters’ questions about Moore, he displayed no such restraint when Al Franken, the Democratic senator and onetime Saturday Night Live star, had to apologize for sexual harassment. A Los Angeles radio host said he had aggressively tongue-kissed her a decade earlier during a USO show rehearsal, and a photo showed him groping her breasts while she slept on a plane; three more accusers soon emerged.

  “The Al Frankenstein picture is really bad, speaks a thousand words,” the president tweeted, and “to think that just last week he was lecturing anyone who would listen about sexual harassment and respect for women.”

  That served as an engraved invitation to the press to accuse the president of selective morality, and to again invoke the women who had accused him of sexual harassment a year earlier. The New York Times ran a front-page headline, “Sneering without Shame.” CNN news anchor Kate Bolduan said “this has officially become a the-president-doesn’t-get-to-do-this moment. He doesn’t get to question Al Franken and stay silent on Roy Moore and no one should allow it”—though it wasn’t clear how the press was supposed to stop it.

  Steve Bannon, a major force behind Moore’s campaign, ducked messages from top Trump officials and made a point of not calling the president, so no one could say he was pressuring the White House. But he applied considerable pressure by sending the aides polling data showing that Moore would win, and urging Sean Hannity to tone things down after the Fox host gave Moore twenty-four hours to knock down the allegations. Bannon’s unmistakable message to Trump: You can again find yourself on the losing side in Alabama, or you can tilt in his direction and take credit when Moore wins.

  Trump soon shifted his stance. First he sent out Kellyanne Conway, who had earlier said “there is no Senate seat worth more than a child,” to tell Fox & Friends that Moore’s Democratic opponent Doug Jones was a liberal who would oppose tax reform, and that “we want the votes in the Senate to get this tax bill through.” That set the stage; when a reporter asked the president whether “Roy Moore, a child molester,” was “better than a Democrat,” Trump replied: “Look, he denies it…He totally denies it. He says it didn’t happen.”

  Those comments triggered a wave of media disgust. MSNBC prime-time host Chris Hayes began his program by saying “today the president of the United States effectively endorsed an accused child molester for U.S. Senate. I’m just going to repeat that to let it sink in.” And CNN news anchor John Berman brought the indictment full circle by saying that Trump “apparently doesn’t believe the eighth accusation of sexual misconduct against Roy Moore, nor does he believe the thirteen women who have come forward to tell their own stories of being sexually harassed by Donald Trump.”

  Once again, a story about questionable conduct by others ultimately became a story about Donald Trump, because Trump had opened the door and journalists were determined to pull their favorite target into the muddy realm of controversy.

  The president couldn’t resist piling on moments after NBC abruptly fired Today anchor Matt Lauer for serious sexual misconduct. He went on a tweetstorm that reflected his deep animus toward his former network, calling for NBC executives, including MSNBC President Phil Griffin, to be fired for fake news. He made a vague insinuation about NBC News Chairman Andrew Lack, saying “Check out Andy Lack’s past!” And he seized on an old, discredited conspiracy theory in asking whether the network would “terminate low ratings Joe Scarborough based on the ‘unsolved mystery’ that took place in Florida years ago? Investigate!” Scarborough, who had been talking that morning about Trump’s embrace of conspiracy theories, was stunned that he would bring up discredited gossip about an intern in his Florida congressional office who was found to have died of natural causes in 2001.

  The Twitter barrage came just as news organizations were flatly depicting the president as detached from reality, based on the boomerang from his own experience with sexual harassment allegations. The top newspapers reported that Trump was privately telling people he wasn’t sure that was his voice on the Access Hollywood video, that the tape might be bogus or doctored—despite the fact that he had apologized for the remarks and NBC had confirmed its authenticity.

  The Washington Post said, “Trump simply rejects facts—and his own past admissions—as he spins a new narrative.” The New York Times, saying Trump was again questioning Barack Obama’s birth certificate, called it “part of his lifelong habit of attempting to create and sell his own version of reality,” and quoted “advisers”—unnamed as usual—as saying “he continues to privately harbor a handful of conspiracy theories that have no grounding in fact.”

  They were now blatantly calling each other liars, with the pretense of politeness often giving way to outright disdain. And the constant combat was no longer a surprise. The president and the press were each clinging to their own version of the truth.

  AFTERWORD

  The media siege against Donald Trump, whether justified or not, has become so embedded in our psyche that sometimes it takes a detached observer—in this case a ninety-three-year-old Democrat—to bring a moment of clarity.

  No less a figure than Jimmy Carter, who endu
red more than his share of bad press, told columnist Maureen Dowd that “the media have been harder on Trump than any other president” he had seen and “feel free to claim that Trump is mentally deranged.”

  I’ve been pretty tough on my profession in this book, and I know that will bring a ton of personal criticism my way. Fair enough. But I believe I’m standing up for the fundamental values of journalism, which have gotten sadly twisted in the Trump era.

  Some journalists have done important work in chronicling the misstatements and excesses of this president, and strive to be fair. I covered half a dozen administrations before Donald Trump took office, have done plenty of investigative reporting, and know that prying loose information that government officials would prefer to keep secret is an arduous and often thankless task.

  I am, in short, not a media-basher.

  But too many journalists and media executives, dwelling in a bubble of like-minded opinion, became convinced that they had a solemn duty to oppose Trump. The normal rules of balance and attempted objectivity were suspended, dismissed as a relic of a calmer time. And they justified the new approach by telling themselves and the world that they had a duty to push back—perhaps even push out—a president they viewed as unqualified, intemperate, and insistent on pursuing harmful policies. They also took on the mission of proving that the president obstructed justice and possibly colluded with Russia, with limited results as 2017 drew to a close.

  There is simply no factual dispute that the coverage of Donald Trump has been overwhelmingly negative in tone, tenor, and volume. Some of these stories have been legitimate, some generated by Trump himself, but many others are tendentious, or biased, or minor developments magnified out of all proportion. And on the commentary side, many conservatives as well as liberals remain downright hostile in their criticism of Trump.

  To be sure, Trump has at times made mistakes, stretched or obscured the truth, and gone too far in attacking journalists and painting them as enemies of the country.

  And while the media still play a vital role in separating fact from fiction, the president’s criticisms—and their own blinders and blunders—have cast that role in doubt.

  The media have become more tribal, their outlets often serving as a badge of personal identity. Conservatives and liberals, Trump fans and Trump bashers, have split into ideological camps, unwilling to tolerate the slightest deviation from their side, wedded to their version of the truth.

  A common refrain among Trump’s antagonists in the press is that they must resist normalizing his presidency. But in the process, they have abnormalized journalism.

  Perhaps the gravest offense is the disdain and derision, if not outright revulsion, that seep into so many reports and segments about the president—especially in the entertainment culture that, by osmosis, spills into the media culture as well.

  Just to be clear: I’m making this case not because I resent journalism, but because I love journalism and believe it has lost its way, choosing sides in a politically charged struggle, practically earning the label of opposition party against an unlikely leader. Too many journalists have subjected him to trial by Twitter, overreacted to his personal invective, and lost sight of what truly matters in people’s lives.

  Donald Trump will not be president forever, but the media’s reputation, badly scarred during these polarizing years, might never recover.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My thanks to Rafe Sagalyn, my longtime friend and literary agent, without whom this book literally would not have been possible, given the resistance in the publishing business to an unvarnished look at the battles between President Trump and the media. I’m grateful to Harry Crocker and his team at Regnery for instantly grasping the potential of this book and skillfully bringing it to market. My colleagues at Fox News have supported my media criticism and my independence, even on the most sensitive subjects, and many are valued friends. The rest of you who have put up with me know who you are.