Abstract
In their haste to attack Donald Trump for his attitude towards them, American journalists risk doing exactly what he accuses them of
Sometimes you just have to stand back and admire the sheer gall of the current US president. “I've made stuff up forever, and they always print it,” boasts Donald Trump in Michael Wolff's book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House. It's a wonderful Trumpian piece of bravado and you can easily imagine him delivering it completely straight-faced as he sits back expansively in the Oval Office.
And that's the problem about Wolff's book, an exposé of a dysfunctional White House and useless president that has gripped the world's attention like no other Trump exposé - it just sounds so plausible. But did he say it? You might think that, of all the lines in his book, Wolff would make sure that he backed up this particular quote by saying who he said it to, where and when. However, he doesn't provide any context or evidence that he ever said it. Indeed, the book as a whole relies on a style of reportage in which it's rarely clear whether the author was present when something was said or whether he heard it second-hand, or perhaps even third-hand.
The predominantly liberal US news media's open-armed embrace of Wolff's book wasn't a great moment for an industry battling with Trump's accusations of “fake news” and “alternative facts”. Its army of relentless, impartial fact-checkers were distinctly lacking on this one.
After all, Fire and Fury was written by a polemicist and provocateur with a decidedly chequered track record for getting his facts right. Wolff's been accused of not only exaggerating scenes he vividly describes in previous books but of completely inventing them. The case for taking Fire and Fury with a very heavy pinch of salt gets stronger when you realise Wolff's principal source is the ex-Trump strategist Steve Bannon, a man with an axe the size of Alaska to grind about the administration that booted him out. (According to CNN, Bannon had been just about to condemn the book for its inaccuracies but then Trump lambasted him over it and he decided to keep quiet, effectively endorsing it. Hardly a ringing endorsement.)
And yet, despite all this, Fire and Fury has been held up across the US media as the definitive account of the Trump White House. Naturally, it's being made into a television series.
Nothing quite so forcefully illustrates the extent to which the US news media have, when it comes to Trump, dropped their traditional commitment to political even-handedness and accuracy as the way they reacted to Fire and Fury.
Wolff could laugh at Trump's threats to sue, knowing no president in his right mind (or even his wrong one) would submit himself to the US court system. Given that he's even willing to flatly deny he had a feeble inauguration crowd, Trump's rejection of Wolff's book was always going to mean nothing to opponents. The latter, frankly, are nowadays prepared to believe anything. Even Hillary Clinton gave her stamp of approval to Wolff's suspect book by reading an excerpt at the Grammy Awards.
Needless to say, Wolff let the hero worship go to his head and went too far. He insinuated on TV that Trump was having an affair with Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the UN. “You just have to read between the lines… It's toward the end of the book,” he told supercilious chat show host Bill Maher. “There is something in the book that I was absolutely sure of, but it is so incendiary that I just didn't have the ultimate proof.” Considering what he did choose to put in, it sounded pretty flimsy.
Everyone soon worked out what he meant and Wolff claimed Haley had “embraced” rumours of an affair. What she actually did was dismiss them as “disgusting” and “offensive”.
The slur still found an appreciative audience among corners of the media which recoiled in horror when conservatives once circulated a rumour that President Obama had a pregnant mistress and Michelle Obama was filing for divorce.
It was actually a liberal broadcaster - MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski - who finally clobbered Wolff on her programme, cutting him and his “BS” short when he unconvincingly denied ever identifying Haley. (It's worth noting, though, that Brzezinski - who's had some nasty spats with Donald Trump - was only defending Haley's reputation.) Some asked whether, given his shifty behaviour over the Haley story, Wolff's book should be believed at all… which was a little too late.
The book will continue to provide plenty of ammunition for the interminable anti-Trump studio discussions that fill up the schedules of CNN and its pro-Democrat rival MSNBC.
At the end of last year, the Pew Research Centre - probably America's most respected pollster - announced that the media's coverage of Trump had been overwhelmingly negative. Pew found it to have been more than three times more critical than the initial coverage of Barack Obama, and twice that of George W Bush and Bill Clinton.
It's hard not to sympathise with Trump's pursuers. He and his cronies are such shameless and relentless liars, rubbing the media's nose in the outrageous untruths by harping on about “fake news”. It's natural they'll want to defend their own credibility.
The Trump Factor
Does it matter that the US media is so negative about Trump? In the short term, it's been great. 2017 was CNN's most watched year in its history. The 779,000 total viewer average was up by 3 per cent on the previous year, by 10 per cent in the prized 25–54 demographic. Given this wasn't an election year (when ratings traditionally spike), it's fairly obvious that Trump was a big factor. It might not be great for CNN reporters verbally roughed up by Trump supporters at his rallies, but the network's bosses must be secretly delighted every time the president singles it out for special abuse in his regular diatribes against the lying, failing media.
The New York Times, Trump's other chief media bugbear (although he clearly reads it obsessively and talks to its journalists more than he'd ever admit to his diehard supporters) hasn't done badly from his baleful glare either. In 2017, its shares hit a record $20, having been fat since mid-2014. The rise comes on the back of strong gains in digital advertising and subscriptions. So much for Trump's standard jibe that it's “failing”. Often just a little turgid when it gets to set its own worthy agenda day after day, The New York Times is better than it has been for years, competing every day with a resurgent Washington Post for White House scoops. Competing and generally winning.
But what effect will all the Trump-baiting have in the long term? The Trump presidency has been accused of widening the rift between the mainstream media and the conservative “base” into a chasm. Trump fans who accidentally switch over to CNN or find themselves with a copy of the Times or Post will find he's quite correct - the bastards really are out to get him down. Trump-bashing, particularly over the Russia connection, has become an obsession that is knocking everything else off the agenda, even in some conservative news outlets that are also appalled by the president.
Howard Kurtz, a veteran media reporter who worked for 30 years for The Washington Post and CNN before “changing sides” and going to Fox News, has written a new book about Trump's relationship with the media and their “war for the truth”. “The past two years have radicalised me,” Kurtz writes. “I am increasingly troubled by how many of my colleagues have decided to abandon any semblance of fairness out of a conviction that they must save the country from Trump.”
Kurtz believes Trump has staked his presidency on destroying the news media's credibility, just as it is determined to do the same to him. Many news organisations, he adds, are “no longer making much attempt to hide their contempt” for the president. That's certainly true, though Kurtz may be over-egging the president's cunning to argue that the media have fallen into Trump's “trap”. Those close to him say he genuinely expected to get more credit and respect for winning the election and so inevitably felt stung - and possibly vengeful - when the media didn't oblige.
Guilty until proven innocent has become the fate of men in the media and entertainment worlds accused of sexual misconduct. Through every fault of his own, Donald Trump is now in the same boat.
Tom Leonard is the Daily Mail's US correspondent.
