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It’s become a truism (including in this newsletter) that Trump has metaphorically flooded the zone since returning to office last month, overwhelming the news media and his political opponents with an apparently strategic torrent of radical actions and statements. Recently, the metaphor became literal: Trump signed an order that led to a huge increase in the flow of water from two dams in California, acting, it seems, on the inaccurate political talking point that doing so earlier would have helped fight the devastating recent fires in LA. (The military had “TURNED ON THE WATER,” Trump wrote on social media. “The days of putting a Fake Environmental argument, over the PEOPLE, are OVER. Enjoy the water, California!!!”) At least two journalists responded that this was the behavior of a “mad king.” In recent days, other media-watchers have applied the same epithet to other things Trump has said and done: proposing that the US make Canada “our Cherished 51st State”; proposing a clampdown on paper straws; trying to install himself as chair of the Kennedy Center’s board.
As I wrote recently, it’s legitimately difficult for the news media to keep up with all the zone flooding, both metaphorical and real. Various critics, however, have argued in recent days that major mainstream outlets aren’t doing a sharp enough job with the journalistic and attentional resources that they do have at their disposal—that they’ve soft-pedaled Trump’s stated plan to turn Gaza into a beach resort by failing to describe it as “ethnic cleansing,” for instance, or failed to communicate the gravity of Elon Musk’s meddling with the machinery of government by failing to call it a “coup.” (Some very mainstream outlets have used the C-word.) Marisa Kabas, an independent journalist who beat top outlets to the story of Trump ordering a freeze on practically all federal funding, told my colleague Sacha Biazzo last week that “many outlets aren’t equipped to handle this moment” because “they are clinging to traditional norms taught in journalism schools or traditional media institutions. They are not comfortable with breaking the rulebook, even in the face of clear and present fascism.” Around the same time, the media reporter Oliver Darcy asked readers of his publication, Status, to “imagine if mainstream news organizations covered a looming natural disaster in the way [they have] covered Trump. A category five hurricane barrels toward the Florida coast, but instead of wall-to-wall coverage warning people to seek shelter and evacuate, the local news stuck to its regular newscasts as if it were just going to rain a little more than usual.” Media leaders needn’t fret “about being the boy who cried wolf,” he added, reaching for a different analogy. “The wolf is now in the barn and mauling the livestock.”
Darcy argued that, while there’s been a lot of sharp reporting on Trump’s early moves, the “news generals back in the command center” aren’t promoting it with enough urgency, sticking with allotted programming and “‘both sides’ oriented” panel discussions rather than extending newscasts or breaking out banner headlines in “monster sized font.” (I noted recently that in the first six months of 2020, the New York Times ran thirty-three full-width headlines; since the day after Trump was inaugurated, they haven’t run a single one on the front page of the print edition.) To some extent, I sympathize with the arguments of Darcy and others; it’s hard to generalize, of course, but certain stories do feel like they’re being underplayed at the highest levels of the media business, at least by the traditional metrics Darcy cites.
As I wrote recently, however, treating every story emanating from Trump’s Washington as a five-alarm fire, even if the individual stories merit that treatment, can have a flattening effect that ultimately redounds to Trump’s benefit; the architects of his flood-the-zone approach likely know this, and so resisting falling for it is reasonable, even if, from the outside, it can be hard to differentiate this response from complacency and there is doubtless some of the latter at work, too. And as I see it at this (still very early) juncture, some of the biggest media misses of Trump’s second term have stemmed from an instinct to overhype his actions and claims.
Again, there is some underselling going on. The story of Musk’s attempted takeover of the nuts and bolts of government has attracted some excellent coverage, though the biggest players haven’t always led the way on that—Wired, a tech-focused magazine, has done perhaps the most essential work on this beat, while niche outlets that cover the federal workforce have also made notable contributions—and on the whole, the urgency of the news cycle around it doesn’t seem to reflect the potentially seismic consequences of what Musk is doing. And several media narratives that I’ve noticed have served to soften the edges of Trump’s early actions. Journalists have sometimes pushed the idea that we shouldn’t be surprised by the radical things Trump is doing because he promised them on the campaign trail, a classic standard of political accountability that can feel unsuited to the Trump era, when the promises are often the problem. (Trump’s allies have pushed this idea, too, and not always faced sharp enough journalistic pushback.) The media assertion that Trump had “no evidence” when he blamed the tragic DC plane crash on diversity initiatives was true but also an almost laughable understatement and really not the point. (Sir, you’ve asserted that the sky is green, do you have evidence for this?) Some outlets are still, for some reason, wasting time on judging whether Trump’s behavior is unifying or presidential.
Major outlets have also been criticized, however, for overplaying some of the things that Trump says and does, reporting them as faits accomplis—especially in short forms like headlines and push notifications—even if he isn’t actually doing the thing or, more to the point, legally can’t. This has been a problem since at least Trump’s first day back in office, when various outlets relayed matter-of-factly that he was terminating birthright citizenship even though it’s in the Constitution. (Judges have so far blocked that order.) The problem has recurred since: last week, for instance, numerous headlines centered El Salvador’s offer to incarcerate American criminals in its territory without noting as prominently that deporting US citizens in this manner would appear to be extremely illegal. Accompanying stories on this sort of thing have often noted the illegality, though critics have argued that they sometimes do so in a squishy way, qualifying it as the opinion of scholars or, worse, Trump’s political opponents.
Then there’s the overselling of things the administration is already doing but not to as radical an extent as Trump and his allies might want you to believe. Trump’s moves to deport people are a huge story with obvious human consequences—and yet his “mass deportation” campaign hasn’t so far played out to the extent that he foreshadowed. Some coverage has noted the discrepancy between the numbers and Trump and his allies’ (including, erm, Dr. Phil?) PR blitz on the subject. (One especially sharp story in The Guardian last week noted that Immigration and Customs Enforcement appears to have updated the timestamps on old press releases trumpeting operations so that they appear higher up on Google and thus seem, at a glance, to be new.) In other areas, however, Trump announcements have generated wall-to-wall coverage before proving to be of less-than-advertised, or at least uncertain, substance. Last weekend, he said that he was about to slap significant tariffs on Canadian and Mexican goods, before agreeing to pause them following negotiations. Then came the comments about Gaza, which shot to the top of news bulletins and stretched the boundaries of polite journalistic language—the word “brazen” did overtime; the Times turned to it after initially describing Trump’s proposal as “audacious”—before an at-least-partial walkback.
It is, of course, totally understandable that these stories would get blanket coverage. Even if Trump never follows through on either front (and Gaza is clearly never going to be turned into a US-owned beach resort, whatever Trump’s actual intentions), his words have concrete consequences for the global economy and international relations. Under any other president, either story would have dominated the news cycle for weeks, if not months. And yet, if it’s glib to dismiss these stories as distraction tactics unworthy of attention, they did distract from hugely consequential things that Trump and Musk are already doing—and that, in the case of their attempted gutting of the US Agency for International Development, are already exerting a non-hypothetical humanitarian cost, in Gaza and elsewhere. A big problem in Trump’s first term was letting him yank media focus around. To some extent, he gets to do this as the president, but the stuff that’s actually happening should matter to us most.
In a widely shared recent essay, Ezra Klein, a columnist at the Times, argued that the key task of Trump’s second term is not to “believe” him; Trump has significant power, Klein wrote, but when he says he can do things beyond the scope of that power, we shouldn’t just cede that. “Trump knows the power of marketing,” Klein wrote. “If you make people believe something is true, you make it likelier that it becomes true.” Klein’s advice was not specifically directed at journalists, but it applies to us, too. Again, here, there are complications. If the past four years have taught us anything, it’s that Trump seemingly can do things like, say, inciting an insurrection at the Capitol and get away with them; now that he’s back in office, his apparently illegal orders might be seen as a strong-arm tactic to get Congress and the courts to change the law, or at least circumvent checks and balances that are slow and somewhat weak. Klein acknowledged that it is “not impossible” to imagine this bet paying off, even if he thinks that “Trump’s odds are bad.” Klein’s colleague Jamelle Bouie made the case last week that there is “no going back” from what Trump and Musk are doing to the federal government since they are “creating facts on the ground.” Those “with the direct institutional power to slam the brakes lack the will and those with the will lack the power,” Bouie lamented, referring, in the first instance, to a “supine” GOP-controlled Congress. “Somewhere,” Bouie wrote, “King Charles I is jealous.”
And yet, Trump is not a king—not even a mad one—and it’s the media’s job to clearly and very consistently point this out; the press might lack the power even of the courts, but we are still a check on government, even if only through our choice of words and the stories we decide to prioritize, and we can and should be clear-eyed and open-minded about what Trump might actually be able to achieve without rhetorically imbuing him with powers he doesn’t actually have. Trump, Klein noted, has always wanted to be king and now is trying to play one on TV. To the extent that we, not he, control that medium, we shouldn’t let him.
Other notable stories:
- Recently, the Pentagon announced that it would “rotate” NBC, NPR, the Times, and Politico out of their dedicated office spaces in the building, while rotating in mostly pro-Trump outlets. (Barbara Starr, formerly of CNN, wrote about it for CJR.) On Friday, officials added CNN, the Washington Post, The Hill, and the War Zone to the outgoing list, in favor of the Free Press, the Washington Examiner, the Daily Caller, and Newsmax, though the former outlets will retain access to the building (and the details of the announcement were confusing). In other media news out of DC, Trump and Musk both called last week for specific journalists to be fired over coverage they didn’t like; the Times has more. And, also for the Times, Jim Rutenberg explored the apparent Nixonian roots of Trump’s anti-press playbook.
- Last year, Nevada’s highest court rejected a defamation claim that the casino mogul and Republican operative Steve Wynn brought against the Associated Press over its coverage of sexual-assault allegations against him, ruling that he had failed to show the AP acted with “actual malice” and thus meet the high bar for libel claims brought by public figures under long-standing US Supreme Court precedent. Now Wynn is asking the latter court to hear an appeal and use it to revisit the “actual malice” precedent; it’s not clear if the justices will take up the invitation, but at least two of them have previously suggested that they should do so. A ruling in Wynn’s favor could weaken press protections across the board, the Nevada Independent notes.
- Yesterday, Lee Enterprises, the owner of local newspapers including the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Omaha World-Herald, said that it had been targeted by a cyberattack that disrupted many of its titles’ print and digital operations last week; the company is investigating who was behind the attack. In other local-news news, Hearst, which already owns the San Francisco Chronicle, is in advanced talks to acquire the rival Santa Rosa Press Democrat, which is currently under local ownership; the San Francisco Standard has more. And state lawmakers in Idaho are considering introducing a “shield law” for journalists; the Idaho Capital Sun has more.
- CJR’s Lauren Watson profiled NEWSWELL, an initiative under which struggling local newsrooms are donating themselves to Arizona State University in exchange for administrative support; the program acquired the Times of San Diego last year and has since taken on two other California outlets, Stocktonia and the Santa Barbara News-Press. (ASU has a presence in the state.) “We want all the journalists to have a living wage and be able to send their kids to school,” Mi-ai Parrish, a professor and member of NEWSWELL’s board, said. “It’s an off-ramp that creates a ramp up.”
- And police in Israel raided a prominent Palestinian-owned bookstore in Jerusalem yesterday and arrested two of the owners, Mahmoud and Ahmed Muna, on suspicion of “selling books containing incitement and support for terrorism”; according to Mahmoud Muna’s wife, soldiers picked out books with Palestinian iconography, carted them away, and requested that the owners’ detention be extended while officials read the books. Diplomats from various countries attended a hearing in the case today, while protesters gathered outside court in solidarity.
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