Abstract
With November’s American election looming, two timely books examine Donald Trump’s antagonistic relationship with the media and his increasingly distant relationship with the truth. Both raise the difficult question of what journalists should do when confronted with a politician who not only lies, but does not seem to care.
The Washington Post has been running a fact-checking column since the 2008 election that the Trump presidency has given additional salience. As Glenn Kessler, the lead author, notes: “Every president lies. What is unique about Trump is that he lies and misleads on just about everything on a regular basis.”
Under the ownership of Amazon boss Jeff Bezos, the Post has expanded the fact-checking team and now includes a video operation. Depending on the gravity of the offence, the paper awards statements an ascending number of Pinocchios, named in honour of the fairy-tale puppet with the expanding nose. Whoppers get four Pinocchios.
To date, the Post team has identified no fewer than 19,000 misleading Trump claims (and it’s still counting). Trump sometimes makes more than 120 false claims in a single day. He has repeated 400 of them three or more times. What make this book such a disquieting read is seeing all the untruths laid out in one volume.
And then, just when you think you have read it all, you come across something like the section devoted to Trump’s “phantom factory openings”. To give just one example, in 2019, he claimed to have opened a new job-creating Apple plant in Texas. The facts: he didn’t open it. It is not an Apple plant. It had been open since 2012, anyway.
Faced with such a volume of fabrications, there has been an intense debate in American journalism about whether and when to call out such statements as lies. The Washington Post team use the word lie only when they can determine that Trump knew he wasn’t telling the truth. As the authors acknowledge, it is a high hurdle because Trump often seems to have convinced himself that his falsehoods are true.
Kessler puts his finger on something quite important politically when he says that part of Trump’s “secret sauce” is that he says things which his supporters believe to be true even though they are not. To his supporters, it feels as though they have a politician who is finally telling the truth.
As the authors see it, Trump’s attacks on the media are a deliberate strategy to “undermine the very concept of neutral unbiased reporting… Trump’s aides frequently suggest there is no such thing as an absolute verifiable truth”. It is a hallmark of authoritarian regimes to call the truth into question.
The book goes on to ask whether Trump has changed the nature of the presidency and whether he offers a template for a future president who is a more skilled liar with a firmer grasp on how to harness the power of government.
At risk is the whole future of liberal democracy. As The Washington Post’s executive editor Marty Baron has put it: “How can we have a functioning democracy when we cannot agree on the most basic facts?”
The man in the front row seat of the second book is Jonathan Karl, senior White House correspondent for ABC News in Washington. From his seat in the press briefing room, he gets a close-up view of the comings and goings at the Trump White House. He has known and covered Trump for more than 25 years since their early exchanges in New York.
He sees a president both at war with, and in love with, the news media. For Trump, it’s all one big show: “He tracks the ratings and the crowds. He follows the reviews. He slams the critics but craves their approval. And when he can’t get their approval, he sets out to prove them wrong by pointing to his adoring fans.”
Karl knows Trump well and his verdict on a chaotic White House is interesting, but there is little here that has not been widely reported elsewhere. Much more interesting is his analysis of press room colleagues who have embraced the stance now known as “resistance journalism”. CNN’s Jim Acosta (notably and loudly) and others have decided that sceptical questioning is no longer enough; an angrier and more confrontational approach is needed.
Karl is not a fan: “…all too often, reporters and news organizations have aided and abetted the effort to undermine the free press by openly displaying how much they detest this president… behaving like anti-Trump partisans, rather than journalists striving for fairness and objectivity. We are not the opposition party but that is the way some of us have acted, doing more to undermine the credibility of the free press than the president’s taunts have done.”
Though when Acosta was controversially banned from the White House for his disruptive behaviour, Karl, as president of the White House Correspondents Association, supported the moves to get him reinstated. Acosta did get his pass back after the intervention of a federal judge. Trump called on him at his first press conference back. It looks like Trump and Acosta need each other.
If both books underline the true awfulness of the Trump presidency, all is not gloom. The Post’s authors remind us that Trump spends so much time attacking his opponents and doubling down on his base that he has never been able to expand his support. It has made him the first president since World War Two whose approval rating has never exceeded 50 per cent. If the polls are right, there may yet be hope in November.
