Journalists are psychically wired to, at all costs, avoid being part of the stories they report. That’s why covering the Trump administration must be agonizing for them. The president has called reporters the “most dishonest people in the world” and says he is in a “running war” with them. His chief strategist and alter ego, Stephen Bannon, referred to the press corps as the “opposition party” and said it should “keep its mouth shut.” It’s enough to make a reporter feel like a Christian Scientist with appendicitis, to borrow an old Tom Lehrer simile.
Trump’s choice of the word “war” to describe his relationship with the news media is, in a way, apt. Truth and war have always had a relationship. It’s been said that the first casualty of war is truth. In this case, truth is what started the war in the first place.
Much – on some days most – of what President Trump says is false, wholly lacking even a casual resemblance to objective truth. Reporters write and produce stories about the president’s lies, setting the record straight with clear documentation. Seems straightforward enough, right? The problem is the unavoidable optics: an unbiased news media repeatedly calling the president of the United States a liar. The White House response, of course, is always a doubling-down on the lie along with the obligatory attack on the “totally dishonest” news media. It’s now a continuous loop. Trump lies. The media call him on it and report the facts. Trump blasts the reporters and then tells more lies. Rinse and repeat.
If the previous paragraph had been written a year ago as a story line summary for a potential political novel, any literary agent would have said, “Don’t waste my time.” Facts, after all, speak for themselves. How preposterous to think a president would continue to lie after being proven wrong. How crazy to assume that anyone would still believe him. That kind of rational, real world thinking went out the window last November when America elected as its 45th president a man who broke all campaign fact-checking records for uttering completely untruthful statements. Turns out he was just getting started. The first few weeks of his presidency has produced a steady stream of totally false utterances.
This has created, awkwardly, a new normalcy for journalists. Prior to Trump, it was unheard of for a news outlet to routinely contradict a president’s assertions. Politicians, of course, have frequently accused each other of lying, but reporters operated above such partisan fray, presenting the facts and the arguments of both sides, and letting their readers or viewers draw their own conclusions. Those were the days, of course, when reasonable people would offer credible alternative spins on the same set of facts. This White House has introduced us to “alternative facts,” representations that are simply wrong. That has led to, as Dan Barry of the New York Times noted recently, straight news stories that use adverbs like “falsely” or “wrongly” in framing what President Trump said. Other news outlets have frequently peppered their Trump reporting with these phrases: “with no evidence,” “won’t provide proof,” “unverified claims,” or “repeating debunked claims.” This has never happened before in the history of political journalism.
The uniqueness that is Donald Trump forced the news media to make a Hobson’s choice: just report what Trump says and let others call it a lie, or label clearly false presidential statements as inaccurate and stand accused of being the “opposition party.” Most major news outlets made the right choice. If Trump says, as a recent New York Times headline put it, “Up is Down,” reporters now routinely include a notation in their story that, in this case, up is actually up and that the president’s declaration that up is down is false. For example, the Chicago Tribune reported that Trump was wrong when he said two people were shot and killed during former president Obama’s farewell address in that city. According to police records, there were no shootings that evening. The Philadelphia Inquirer quoted Trump’s comment that the city’s murder rate was “terribly increasing,” and then reported that he was absolutely wrong and that the murder rate has steadily declined over the past decade. The Washington Post, which developed an app that quickly fact-checks the president’s Twitter messages, identified 24 false or misleading statements Trump made during his first seven days in office.
As a former reporter, I totally get how difficult this transition must have been for journalists. These are people deeply committed to fairly and accurately reporting the news, free from any taint of partisanship. Trump, however, demands a game change. There has never been a president with such a propensity to make things up on the spot, believe them, and then keep repeating them. In a world like that, reporting a president’s statements that you know to be false, without labeling them as such, removes all semblance of truth-telling from journalism.
One encouraging sign in this bizarre “alternative facts” era is that many people have a hunger for the truth. Most major news operations have experienced dramatic increases in subscribers and viewers since the election. This is counter to the normal cycle of news consumption which typically peaks immediately after an election and then tapers off. Yet, the Columbia Journalism Review reports that the New York Times has been signing up to 10,000 new subscribers a day since the election. The Washington Post’s readership has increased significantly. The Los Angeles Times has had a 60 percent subscription increase. Similarly, cable and network news programs are experiencing record ratings. The moral of the story is simple. It is not easy being a news reporter in Donald Trump’s America, but for those of us who want to know the truth, there is no more important job right now.