Abstract
When an American president deals in “alternative facts”, reporters should take off the kid gloves, says a British journalist on the scene
Did she really just ask that? One could almost hear the collective gulp of astonishment from newsrooms across the US as the BBC's Laura Kuenssberg fixed Donald Trump with the steely glare of a Westminster reporter who knows she's heading out of Washington on the next plane and let him have it with both barrels. “You've said that torture works, you've praised Russia, you want to ban Muslims from coming to the US, you want to punish abortion,” she reminded him at his White House press conference with Theresa May in January. What would he say to British people alarmed by his beliefs and the idea of him becoming “leader of the free World”?
“This was your choice of a question,” Trump said, eyes rolling, as he turned to May. “There goes that relationship.” Apart from confirming that he can be funny when he wants (I am assuming, perhaps prematurely, that he wasn't suggesting his foreign policy will be decided by the politeness of each country's journalists), Trump's reaction confirmed something rather more obvious: he's not used to being talked to like that by reporters. At least not by journalists he isn't about to rip to shreds verbally and will never allow into his presence again. Perhaps it was the accent. You could tell he was a little taken aback, too, when the gentleman from The Sun (Tom Newton Dunn) called him “brash”. Trump tried to laugh that one off as well, denying he was brash at all.
Back in the CNN studio it was observed that the usual White House press pack would never dared have asked such questions. Still, you could tell the folks were royally enjoying the sight of the President having to grin and bear a few hard questions from the fourth estate without throwing a wobbly about his hate-filled media foes. (US news networks get a similar kick out of showing excerpts from Prime Minister's Question Time – so rude and boisterous! – almost giving a “viewer discretion required” warning in advance).
Trump and his senior cronies haven't wasted much time in getting their teeth into the media. And this time the journalists are biting back almost as viciously. There have been jitters, moments when one worried the American media, and the White House press corps in particular, would simply treat him like another president. One such moment came when Trump, livid after CNN and BuzzFeed revealed just before the inauguration the existence of the ex-MI6 man's dossier about his alleged Russian adventures, refused to reply to the CNN man at a press conference. The president churlishly slung all sorts of playground insults at the reporter, who tried to stand his ground. His press colleagues could have shown some solidarity, got up and walked out even, but instead meekly waited to ask their own questions.
However, the US media – or a large part of it – appears to have since decided it will have to suspend the usual rules of engagement with US presidents. Decades of too much polite, fawning deference – epitomised in the laughable institution of the White House correspondents’ dinner – look like ending. In the process, the Trump administration could unwittingly be the saviour of the mainstream US media it professes to hate.
After that awful period in purdah for misreading the electorate, there's a spring in the media's step as they take on a new role of trying to ensure the electorate doesn't do the same thing again in four years.
America's biggest newspapers, prone as they are to lapsing into self-righteous tedium when they have to set their own news agenda, are rising to the occasion now they have the glaring faults of the Trump White House to focus their minds. The New York Times accused Trump on its front page of “advancing two falsehoods” in a speech at the CIA. Associated Press put out a comprehensive demolition of the Trump claims under the heading “Trump wrong over inauguration crowds”. It's not clear if the Trump camp was genuinely expecting a honeymoon period, but the outrage about a biased media would be more convincing if it didn't pile lie upon lie upon blatant inaccuracy in public statements and Trump's tweets. From the size of the inauguration crowd onwards, it's been breathtaking.
TV news, whose ratings soared thanks to Trump, was previously more to blame than print for giving him a soft ride. Trump long ago cast CNN as his chief media persecutor and it is now revelling in being public enemy number one to a new president with record low popularity ratings. Just days after Trump's inauguration, CNN announced it had declined to air a live press conference with his new spokesman, Sean Spicer. Instead of automatically breaking its programming for it, CNN said it would wait and see if there was anything worth airing. The media academic Danna Young sympathised: when the White House uses briefings to “promote demonstrably false information and refuses to take questions, then press ‘access’ becomes meaningless at best and complicit at worst,” she said.
During the campaign, Trump made a virtue of the hostility of the mainstream media in his fiery stump speeches, encouraging his hardcore supporters to boo them like pantomime villains. Now he's president and he needs to communicate with the people who actually watch CNN or, God forbid, read The New York Times. And if he can't do that, he needs to nullify them completely so that whatever they say can be automatically rejected.
Might this explain why he's turned up the venom several notches, complaining every day about their “lies” and “fake news”? Post-inauguration, Trump aides soon started referring to the media not just as a major annoyance, but also as “the opposition”. What this means for the traditional mutual dependence of a president and the media is anyone's guess, but Trump must soon realise that even having 22.5 million Twitter followers and a few friends on night-time Fox News has its limits.
Steve Bannon, Trump's chief political strategist, told the media to “keep its mouth shut”. If you sense just a hint of underlying threat there, you're not alone. Many journalists and academics fear the Trump administration may gravitate into clamping down on the media rather than just insulting it. And for all America's First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech, experts warn the constitution doesn't offer that much media protection – not even ensuring the anonymity of sources. Public confidence in the media is at an all-time low.
All is not lost, however. A large chunk of public opinion looks to be mobilising in potential support – after all, who would have thought a Hollywood megastar would devote part of her Golden Globes acceptance speech to championing press freedom, as Meryl Streep did? Will the US media come out of this stronger and more vibrant, less po-faced and self-reverential? It will probably need to. Yes, you too can ask questions like Laura Kuenssberg.
