Donald Trump’s election as president of the United States was a humbling moment for the media in that country and right around the world. By and large, journalists failed to anticipate the possibility that a man like Trump could win the world’s most powerful office by breaking every convention in the political rulebook. Stung by its irrelevance in the face of such an upset, the media has predictably been keen to reexamine long-held conventions of its own.
For journalists engaging in such introspection out loud, there is no doubt about the question du jour: “How should the media cover Donald Trump?”
It’s an inquiry that almost always rests on the premise that Donald Trump is so uniquely deceitful, dangerous or both that he can’t be approached like any other leader or powerful politician. If Trump was able to refashion politics in his image by running against all established norms, journalists need to play by a different set of rules, too. The time-tested rules of journalism, in other words, aren’t enough.
Emblematic of this mindset have been calls for the media to boycott April’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, an annual event where the president typically pays tribute to the tradition of a free press while engaging in lighthearted ribbing of the journalists in attendance. Iconic magazines Vanity Fair and the New Yorker have already vowed to stay away, with other media outlets expected to follow suit. Taking the boycott calls a step further, author and commentator Reza Aslan suggested that journalists who attend the event should themselves be shunned.
The sense that desperate times call for desperate measures has also been evident in much of the coverage of Trump since he entered the White House just three weeks ago. On several occasions, the New York Times has taken the unusual step of describing flagrantly untrue claims made by Trump as “lies,” rather than “falsehoods” or “untruths.” Elsewhere, Keith Olbermann, a correspondent for men’s media brand GQ, has implored outlets to refuse to “participate in the Trump propaganda game” by applying a time-delay to his speeches so they can be paused and fact-checked in realtime.
And after all of this scrambling to repurpose the media for the age of Trump? A plurality of Americans believe it is out to get the president. In a poll carried out by Gallup at the end of last month, 36 percent of adults said the coverage of Trump had been “too tough,” compared to 28 percent who felt the opposite and 31 percent who deemed it about right. The results echoed a poll taken during the election campaign in which the public, by an astonishing 10-1 margin, perceived the media to favor a Hillary Clinton presidency.
Seemingly, the media has learnt little from the fact that its authority is at an all-time low, with less than one-third of Americans telling pollsters they have trust in the institution. This distrust is especially pronounced among conservatives in the so-called flyover states, who’ve long sensed that journalists in the liberal urban centers have barely concealed contempt for them and their values.
All of which makes the decision to treat Trump as uniquely impervious to the normal practice of journalism a remarkably short-sighted and self-defeating exercise. If anything, treating Trump as the enemy plays right into his hands. When the president’s chief strategist Steve Bannon said last month that the media had become the “opposition party,” he did so in full knowledge that a huge number of Americans would enthusiastically nod along.
Journalist rigor demands that reporters can hardly be “too tough” on a government, but they should be accurate, fair and consistent in holding power to account irrespective of party or ideology. The problem for journalists wondering out loud about demolishing precedent is the great number of people who will suspect their commitment to truth is both recent and borne of ideology.
There is no unique or mysterious formula for covering Donald Trump. The “right” way is the same as that under previous presidents: with scepticism, a rigorous commitment to the facts, and the openness of mind to appreciate a diversity of perspectives. Only by returning to basics can the media even hope to claw back the trust it once had.
All other tinkering will only strengthen the perception of an institution composed of self-satisfied partisans who, given a different outcome, would at this moment be indulging a President Hillary Clinton with a generous honeymoon period of soft coverage.
John Power is an Irish journalist based in Melbourne