Frank Bruni, New York Times Op-Ed columnist/BDnews24
“Pocahontas” won’t be lonely for long.
As other Democrats join Elizabeth Warren in the contest for the party’s presidential nomination, President Donald Trump will assign them their own nicknames, different from hers but just as derisive. There’s no doubt.
But how much heed will we in the media pay to this stupidity? Will we sprint to Beto O’Rourke, Cory Booker or Mike Bloomberg for a reaction to what Trump just called one of them and then rush back to him for his response to that response? Or will we note Trump’s latest nonsense only briefly and pivot to matters more consequential?
That’s a specific question but also an overarching one — about the degree to which we’ll let him set the terms of the 2020 presidential campaign, about our appetite for antics versus substance, and about whether we’ll repeat the mistakes that we made in 2016 and continued to make during the first stages of his presidency. There were plenty.
Trump tortures us. Deliberately, yes, but I’m referring to the ways in which he keeps yanking our gaze his way. I mean the tough choices that he, more than his predecessors in the White House, forces us to make. His demand for television airtime Tuesday night was a perfect example: We had to weigh a request in line with precedent against a president out of line when it comes to truth. We had to wrestle with — and figure out when and how to resist — his talent for using us as vessels for propaganda.
We will wrestle with that repeatedly between now and November 2020, especially in the context of what may well be the most emotional and intense presidential race of our lifetimes. With the dawn of 2019 and the acceleration of potential Democratic candidates’ preparations for presidential bids, we have a chance to do things differently than we did the last time around — to redeem ourselves.
Our success or failure will affect our stature at a time of rickety public trust in us. It will raise or lower the temperature of civic discourse, which is perilously hot. Above all, it will have an impact on who takes the oath of office in January 2021. Democracies don’t just get the leaders they deserve. They get the leaders who make it through whatever obstacle course — and thrive in whatever atmosphere — their media has created.
“The shadow of what we did last time looms over this next time,” former CBS newsman Dan Rather, who has covered more than half a century of presidential elections, told me. And what we did last time was emphasise the sound and the fury, because Trump provided both in lavish measure.
“When you cover this as spectacle,” Rather said, “what’s lost is context, perspective and depth. And when you cover this as spectacle, he is the star.” Spectacle is his métier. He’s indisputably spectacular. And even if it’s a ghastly spectacle and presented that way, it still lets him control the narrative. As writer Steve Almond observed in a recently published essay, “He appears powerful to his followers, which is central to his strongman mystique.”
Trump was and is a perverse gift to the mainstream, establishment media, a magnet for eyeballs at a juncture when we were struggling economically and desperately needed one. Just present him as the high-wire act and car crash that he is; the audience gorges on it. But readers’ news appetite isn’t infinite, so they’re starved of information about the fraudulence of his supposed populism and the toll of his incompetence. And he wins. He doesn’t hate the media, not at all. He uses us.
Did that dynamic help elect him? There’s no definitive answer. But we gave him an extraordinary bounty of coverage, depriving his rivals of commensurate oxygen and agency. And while our coverage of him had turned overwhelmingly negative by the final months of the 2016 campaign, it by no means started out that way.Thomas Patterson of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy has been analysing that coverage since Trump declared his candidacy for the presidency in 2015. Patterson found that for much of that year, the number of stories about Trump in the country’s most influential newspapers and on its principal newscasts significantly exceeded what his support in polls at the time justified.And those stories were predominantly positive. “The volume and tone of the coverage helped propel Trump to the top of Republican polls,” Patterson wrote in one of his reports about the election. In stark contrast, stories about Hillary Clinton in 2015 were mostly negative.Through the first half of 2016, as Trump racked up victories in the Republican primaries, he commanded much more coverage than any other candidate from either party, and it was evenly balanced between positive and negative appraisals — unlike the coverage of Clinton, which remained mostly negative.Only during their general-election faceoff did Trump and Clinton confront equivalent tides of naysaying. “On topics relating to the candidates’ fitness for office, Clinton and Trump’s coverage was virtually identical in terms of its negative tone,” Patterson wrote.Regarding their fitness for office, they were treated identically? In retrospect, that’s madness. It should have been in real time, too.But we fell prey to a habit that can’t be repeated when we compare the new crop of Democratic challengers to Trump and to one another. We interpreted fairness as a similarly apportioned mix of complimentary and derogatory stories, no matter how different one contender’s qualifications, accomplishments and liabilities were from another’s. If we were going to pile on Trump, we had to pile on Clinton — or, rather, keep piling on her.“It was wall-to-wall emails,” said Jill Abramson, former executive editor of The New York Times and author of a book about the media, “Merchants of Truth,” that will be published next month. She was referring to the questions and complaints about Clinton’s use of a private email server as secretary of state. “When you compare that to the wrongdoing that has been exposed so far by Robert Mueller,” Abramson told me, “it seems like a small thing.” The considerable muck in Clinton’s background never did, and never could, match the mountain of muck in Trump’s.Abramson, who had left The Times and was writing a column for The Guardian during the 2016 campaign, maintains that Trump also benefited from the media’s excessive faith in polls and its insufficient grasp of what was happening among Americans between the coasts. “The basic flaw of the press coverage, and I count myself in it, was the total assumption that Hillary would win,” she said. “The firepower of the investigative spotlight turned on Trump was a little bit less, because no one thought he would be the president, and that was a grave mistake.”I’m not certain that more firepower would have made a difference. For one thing, there were many exposés of Trump’s shady history. For another, he appealed to voters who largely disregard the mainstream media and who thrilled to his exhortations that they disregard it further.